Cheryl Sorg > Cheryl's Quotes

“He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space...”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.”
― J.K. Rowling

“To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“If you look at it the other way round, that's the only reason why this world is inside of me. Maybe it's a paradox, like an image reflected to infinity in a pair of facing mirrors. I am a part of this world, and this world is a part of me.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
― John Cheever

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There are all sorts of experiences we can't really put a name to...The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Falling in love. Words are like nets--we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, grief, or wonder. Finding God is like that, too. If it's happened to you, you know what it feels like. But try to describe it to someone else--and language only takes you so far.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“This is what I am, I'll say, to leave this written
excuse. This is my life.
Now it is clear this couldn't be done-
that in this net it's not just the strings that count
but the air that escapes through the meshes.
Everything else stayed out of reach-
time running like a hare
across the February dew,
and love, best not to talk of love
which moved, a swaying of hips,
leaving no more trace of all its fire
than a spoonful of ash.
That's how it is with so many passing things:
the man who waited, believing, of course,
the woman who was alive and will not be.
All of them believed that, having teeth,
feet, hands, and language,
life was only a matter of honor.
This one took a look at history,
took in all the victories of the past,
assumed an everlasting existence,
and the only thing life gave him was
his death, time not to be alive,
and earth to bury him in the end.
But all that was born with as many eyes
as there are planets in the firmament,
and all her devouring fire
ruthlessly devoured her until the end.
If I remember anything in my life,
it was an afternoon in India, on the banks of a river.
They were burning a woman of flesh and bone
and I didn't know if what came from the sarcophagus
was soul or smoke,
until there was neither woman nor fire
nor coffin nor ash. It was late,
and only the night, the water, the river, the darkness
lived on in that death.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
― Nelson Mandela

“Everyone smiles in the same language.”
― George Carlin

“Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Learning another language is like becoming another person.”
― Haruki Murakami

“We're on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That's all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Because, in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes who we are as people.”
― Haruki Murakami, Yesterday

“Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Yeah. The more languages you know the better. And I've got a knack for them. I taught myself French and it's practically perfect. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood