“I think of life as very much like a game. The one who created it gave us the rules by which it is to be played, rules designed to help us win, rules to help us be happy. The problem is many times we choose to play by our own rules, and then we’re at a loss to understand why we never win.”
― Julie Lessman, quote from A Passion Most Pure
“Because, my dear, God is love. Not just maternal or fraternal love but romantic love as well. Song of Solomon was written to show what the love between a husband and a wife should be, but it was also written to emulate the depth of feeling and love God has for each of us. As intense and wonderful as this young man’s kiss made you feel, more so is the passion and love God has for you. No, your feelings aren’t wrong, but perhaps the timing is.”
― Julie Lessman, quote from A Passion Most Pure
“For years he had possessed her dreams, but she'd been the master of those dreams. Now, he possessed her memory, and there was nothing she could do about it.”
― Julie Lessman, quote from A Passion Most Pure
“It was not a day to remember; it was a day to forget...the memory of it could not pass soon enough.”
― Julie Lessman, quote from A Passion Most Pure
“The warmth was pushed aside, as always, by the cold grip of reality.”
― Julie Lessman, quote from A Passion Most Pure
“After years of pining over something she could never have, she would choose to embrace the cold comfort of reality instead. No more daydreams of his smile, no more journal entries with his name, no more prayers for the impossible. She would not allow it.”
― Julie Lessman, quote from A Passion Most Pure
Julie Lessman
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“We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide–an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide. We are free to decide because decision “happens.” We just decide without having the faintest understanding of how we do it. In fact, it is neither voluntary nor involuntary. To “get the feel” of this relativity is to find another extraordinary transformation of our experience as a whole, which may be described in either of two ways. I feel that I am deciding everything that happens, or, I feel that everything, including my decisions, is just happening spontaneously. For a decision–the freest of my actions-just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me. Such a way of seeing things is vividly described by a modern Zen master, the late Sokei-an Sasaki: One day I wiped out all the notions from my mind. I gave up all desire. I discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude. I felt a little queer–as if I were being carried into something, or as if I were touching some power unknown to me … and Ztt! I entered. I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw people coming towards me, but all were the same man. All were myself! I had never known this world. I had believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never created; I was the cosmos; no individual Mr. Sasaki existed.7 It would seem, then, that to get rid of the subjective distinction between “me” and “my experience”–through seeing that my idea of myself is not myself–is to discover the actual relationship between myself and the “outside” world. The individual, on the one hand, and the world, on the other, are simply the abstract limits or terms of a concrete reality which is “between” them, as the concrete coin is “between” the abstract, Euclidean surfaces of its two sides. Similarly, the reality of all “inseparable opposites”–life and death, good and evil, pleasure and pain, gain and loss–is that “between” for which we have no words.”
― Alan W. Watts, quote from The Way of Zen
“Emily, you mean more to me than anything. I love you. I want to be with you … Help you get through this. Baby, I missed you so much.”
― Nashoda Rose, quote from Torn from You
“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
“I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.”
― Audre Lorde, quote from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
“Einmal im Leben zur rechten Zeit sollte man an Unmögliches geglaubt haben.”
― Christa Wolf, quote from The Quest for Christa T.
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Undeniable: Evolutio...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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