“To love a person is to know what a huge thing a person is, right? There’s such a universe contained in each person, and to love a person is to have such an appreciation of that universe.”
(Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)
Category Archives: Quotes
… favorite sayings …
Change and challenge…
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
(James Baldwin)
As i was about to post that quote this morning — one equally applicable to our social surroundings as to our internal selves — i realized today is a personal anniversary, marking six years cancer-free. It was almost an afterthought. (Almost.)
The quote pairs well with this one:
“When you can’t control what’s happening, challenge yourself to control the way you respond to what’s happening. That’s where your power is.”
(Stephanie Schulte)
Everything that shines…
“The broken will always love harder than most. Once you’ve been in the dark, you learn to appreciate everything that shines.”
(Zachry K. Douglas)
Healing and wounding…
“No one heals himself by wounding another.”
(St. Ambrose of Milan)
Low haiku…
To convey one’s mood
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic
(John Cooper Clarke)
Mark Twain on cats…
“If man could be crossed with a cat, it would enhance the man but diminish the cat.”
(Mark Twain)
Quiet perseverance…
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says, ‘I’ll try again tomorrow’.”
(Mary Radmacher)
December doings…
For me, the best part of the season is connecting — not just with family, but also with friends i’ve come to consider as family.
Making peace in troubled times…
Wherever you fall on the political spectrum, it’s hard to deny that these are troubled times. Thinking about not accepting injustice also brings to mind the pitfalls of ‘fighting fire with fire.’
I recently came across this stirring quote about peacemaking — and was particularly moved by its vision of actively pushing back and yet breaking out of an escalating cycle of retribution:
“Peacemaking does not mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.” (Shane Claiborne)
Yes, the real work is in hashing out *how* to enact such lofty principles — but we can and must let inspiration like this at least get us started.
Ignorance and arrogance…
“It’s very difficult to dispel ignorance if you retain arrogance.”
(Sam Wilson, in Ken Burns’ ‘The Vietnam War’)
I think this applies both to the effort to dispel another’s ignorance, as well as to thinking your own can be corrected.
