Karen > Karen's Quotes

“For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“Admitting your limitations and accepting help makes you stronger too.”
― Jeff Bauman, Stronger

“I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved.”
― Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

“The soul wants to connect, to be heard, and to persuade. But the storyteller, having heard herself so many times before, loses faith in the innate power of her experience or in her ability to convey it.”
― Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

“To be moved by a tragic story that had happened to someone, anyone, was natural. It was another thing to take that tragedy upon yourself as a kind of catchall for whatever pain and grief your own life had held, to brandish it like a badge of honor--or worse, like a weapon, to take from it a lesson of hatred that only perpetuated the kind of thinking that created such tragedies in the first place”
― Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

“All people at root are time optimists. We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“When you're faced with a significantly life-altering negative situation you can't control, you grasp at the little things you can control. The little opportunities where you can make choices for yourself.”
― Josh Sundquist, We Should Hang Out Sometime: Embarrassingly, a True Story

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“It's always a mistake to think the seemingly deranged are not perceptive.”
― Sara Barron, The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race

“It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257-foot bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Sorry wastes time. You have to live your life like you'll never be sorry. It's easier just to do the right thing from the start so there's nothing to apologize for.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Listen, I’m the freak. I’m the weirdo. I’m the troublemaker. I start fights. I let people down. Don’t make Finch mad, whatever you do. Oh, there he goes again, in one of his moods. Moody Finch. Angry Finch. Unpredictable Finch. Crazy Finch. But I’m not a compilation of symptoms. Not a casualty of shitty parents and an even shittier chemical makeup. Not a problem. Not a diagnosis. Not an illness. Not something to be rescued. I’m a person.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“She stopped as soon as she'd come through and the two of them stand there for fully five minutes, for forever, just looking. Staring at each other, right in the eyes, across the space between then, both knowing they have an eternity in which to touch.”
― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

“No matter how old we get, we somehow can never convince ourselves that whatever trial we're in the middle of is only temporary. No matter how may trials we've had in the past, and no matter how well we remember that they eventually were there no longer, we're sure that this one, this one right now, is a permanent state of affairs. But it's not. By nature humans are temporary beings.'
'You're saying i just have to ride it out until it goes away.'
'Not at all, my dear. I'm saying you have to strive for a solution and trust that eventually there will be one.”
― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

“There's nothing like forgiveness for making a person feel guilty. There's nothing like understanding for making a person feel undeserving. Because if someone is willing to forgive a weakness, they deserve better than to have put up with it.”
― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

“That's a very strongly defined term, dear, 'wrong choices' and i'm not sure it's helpful. There are no wrong or right choices, necessarily, just those you make or don't make and the consequences. And by extension, how you deal with the consequences.”
― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

“I wonder if that's how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.
I don't want it to win.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“It's like your sadness is so deep and overwhelming that you're worried it will drown everyone else in your life if you let them too close to it.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“I steer clear of telling. I can't come out with it. The outlandish truth of me. How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting? With those who know my story I talk freely about us.... But with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don't want to shock or make anyone distressed.

But it's not like me to be cagey in my interactions.... But now I try to keep a distance from those who are innocent of my reality. At best I am vague. I feel deceitful at times. But I can't just drop it on someone, I feel--it's too horrifying, too huge.

It's not that I should be honest with everyone, the white lies I tell strangers I don't mind. But there are those I see time and again, have drinks with, share jokes, and even they don't know. They see my cheery side. And I kick myself for being a fraud....

I can see, though, that my secrecy does me no favors. It probably makes worse my sense of being outlandish. It confirms to me that it might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it.”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“I think I also don't confess because I am still so unbelieving of what happened. I am still aghast. I stun myself each time I retell the truth to myself, let alone to someone else. So I am evasive in order to spare myself...I can see though that my secrecy does me no favors. It probably makes worse my sense of being outlandish. It confirms to me that it might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it.”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“Maybe it is not so overwhelming after all, to dissolve the divide between now and then.”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“I was suddenly angry. I wanted to shake not just Lydia but the whole world of people who do not understand the difference between control of emotion and lack of it, and who make a totally illogical connection between inability to read others’ emotions and inability to experience their own.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect

“This is what a small victory feels like. It feels like a little surprise and a lot of relief. It makes the past feel lighter and the future seem even lighter than that, if only for a moment. It feels like rightness winning. It feels like possibility.”
― David Levithan, Boy Meets Boy

“I realize I'm crying a little, too. I remember. Sometimes pain is so unmanageable that the idea of spending another day with it seems impossible. Other times pain acts as a compass to help you through the messier tunnels of growing up. But pain can only help you find happiness if you remember it.”
― Adam Silvera, More Happy Than Not

“She pulls away - and then I see why: she's holding out her palm as a landing place for a firefly. It's easy to forget it's there when it's not glowing, until all of a sudden it comes back and surprises you; it reminds you of grief.”
― Adam Silvera, More Happy Than Not

“I've become this happiness scavenger who picks away at the ugliness of the world, because if there's happiness tucked away in my tragedies, I'll find it no matter what. If the blind can find joy in music, and the deaf can discover it with colors, I will do my best to always find the sun in the darkness because my life isn't one sad ending—it's a series of endless happy beginnings.”
― Adam Silvera, More Happy Than Not

“Friends should be like a good bra, lifting you up. Bad friends are like sports bras. They can do wonders when you go out dancing or during high-energy times, but one a day-to-day basis they really just smush down some of your greatest assets.”
― Mamrie Hart, You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery