Erin Quinn > Erin's Quotes

“Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain befor you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The charitable say in effect, 'I seem to have more than I need and you seem to have less than you need. I would like to share my excess with you.' Fine, if my excess is tangible, money or goods, and fine if not, for I learned that to be charitable with gestures and words can bring enormous joy and repair injured feelings.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here’s how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man’s chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homonculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives.”
― Maya Angelou

“We are walking down the street holding hands. There is a playground at the end of the block, and I run to the swings and I climb on and Henry takes the one next to me facing the opposite direction. And we swing higher and higher passing each other, sometimes in synch and sometimes streaming past each other so fast that it seems we are going to collide. And we laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost or dead or far away. Right now we are here and nothing can mar our perfection or steal the joy of this perfect moment.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.”
― Maya Angelou

“I'd learned enough from life's experiences to understand that destiny's interventions can sometimes be read as invitation for us to address and even surmount our biggest fears. It doesn't take a great genius to recognize that when you are pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
― Maya Angelou

“that's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“When you do nothing you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.”
― Maya Angelou

“But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“You are the sum total of everything you've seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot- it's all right there.”
― Maya Angelou

“If you're for the right thing, you do it without thinking.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn't have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”
― Maya Angelou

“Each of us, famous or infamous, is a role model for somebody, and if we aren't, we should behave as though we are -- cheerful, kind, loving, courteous. Because you can be sure someone is watching and taking deliberate and diligent notes.”
― Maya Angelou

“Of course.. some people, me included, believe that punk is just the most recent manifestation of this, this spirit, this feeling, you know, that things aren't right and that in fact things are so wrong that the only thing we can do is to say Fuck It, over and over again, really loud, until someone stops us.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone.
People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.”
― Maya Angelou

“I sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry about me when I'm gone. It's like marrying a policeman.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“If I could give you one thought, it would be to lift someone up. Lift a stranger up--lift her up. I would ask you, mother and father, brother and sister, lovers, mother and daughter, father and son, lift someone. The very idea of lifting someone up will lift you, as well.”
― Maya Angelou

“The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“Because I know something that you don't know. I know that this is the worst experience of your life, but I also know that someday you'll move past it and you'll be fine. And helping somebody likej you through the worst experience of her life is incredibly gratifying.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage