Its Time Quotes (page 299)
I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's just about getting off. Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.
Chuck Palahniuk
One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim...
Bell Hooks
I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.
Mindy Kaling
He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda . and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first...
Ernest Hemingway
You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim. Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. That day in Moscow, it will all come true, when, for the last time, I take my leave, And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, Leaving my shadow still to be with you.
Anna Akhmatova
There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few priveledged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity, but I find that thy will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart, and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
Rabindranath Tagore
And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent,...
Roberto Bolano
Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing - if this must come - seems the most tragic of all. I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and...
Peter Matthiessen
His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked several times during the course of the film that the heroine looked like she ought to be playing the horse. The comment had some truth in it, in that the heroine did have an equine cast of feature, but he made it too often, and with too little variation; however, she was willing to forgive him, in view of his evident tolerance of her social errors, such as an inability to say...
Margaret Drabble
That’s the thing I want to make clear about depression: It’s got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature’s part...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.
Anne Lamott