Quotes
"What is the source of our first suffering?
It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.
It was born in the moment
when we accumulated silent things within us."
-Gaston Bachelard
“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” -Thomas Mann
“Mythic images…are pictures that involve us both physiologically in our bodily reactions to them and spiritually in our higher thoughts about them. When a person is aware of living mythically, she or he is experiencing life intensively and reflectively.” -Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions
“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.” -Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence
“Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” -George Orwell
“…the biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging. In our society this disease has reached epidemic proportions. We long to belong and feel as if we don’t deserve to.” -Mother Theresa, in Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance, p. 11.
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” -Emile Zola
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” -Martha Graham (1894 - 1991)
“The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal. The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. There there’s also the possibility of bliss.” -Joseph Campbell