Kieran Siddons > Kieran's Quotes

“I myself am heaven and hell”
― James Allen, The Path of Prosperity

“By earnest self-examination strive to realize, and not merely hold as a theory, that evil is a passing phase, a self-created shadow; that all your pains, sorrows and misfortunes have come to you by a process of undeviating and absolutely perfect law; have come to you because you deserve and require them, and that by first enduring, and then understanding them, you may be made stronger, wiser, nobler.”
― James Allen, The Path of Prosperity

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain - This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies -
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.”
― Omar Khayyam, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

“There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.”
― Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

“What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“...that fitful strain of melancholy which will ever be found inseperable from the perfection of the beautiful.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of Edgar Allen Poe Volume 4

“Nothing goes perfectly for us. But... being incomplete is what pushes us onward to the next something... If we were even perfectly satisfied, what meaning would the rest of our lives hold, right?”
― Inoue Takehiko