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S Quotes

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All S Quotes

“So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things. I had been so busy creating a future of love that I never identified the life I was living as the life of love, because up until then I had never felt entitled enough or free enough or, honestly, brave enough to embrace my own narrative. Ironically, I had gone ahead and created the life I secretly must have wanted, but it had to be covert and off the record. Chemo was burning away the wrapper and suddenly I was in my version of life. Thus began the ecstasy - the joy, the pure joy of a spiritual pirate who finds the secret treasure.”

“So much of life’s hardship becomes more bearable when you are able to build and lean on a network of loyalty, support, and love, and gather around you people...who will stand by you and help you. But the thing is you have to let them in; you have to let them see the heartache, pain, and vulnerability, and not cloak those things in a shameful darkness, and then you have to let those people who care about you help you.”

“So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, "What is that difference?" I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there's the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter.”

“So much of my writing process is trying to eliminate any kind of shame or fear of the thoughts that I'm having. Where I would usually backspace, I stop and say, "You know what? This is important, that I say how I feel and don't sugarcoat it, and don't avoid it." In my experience when I do try to avoid something, it makes its way into the work anyway. To be in front of it and just make friends with it is easier for me.”

“So much of our conversation about love is possessive. "You are mine. And if you stop being mine, I will hate you." And so exploring non-possessive ideas of love and friendship is important. Which is not to say we should just break down monogamy, I'm not taking a simplistic point of view. But, in addition to these examples of possessive love that we already have so much of, let us also explore what examples of non-possessive love and affection mean.”

“So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.”

“So much of our life is the circling of a dream. The dream, a changeable elusive presence, is at the heart of our identity, it is the fabric to which all our qualities are stitched. Did it matter that the dream never found fruition in the physical world? The important thing was never to relinquish it. It’s the dream which keeps beauty as an animating source of strength in our lives, which reminds us we are connected to a larger reality.”

“So much of our politics is stuck in patterns of response that aren't working. When student performance is declining in schools, we implement more controls, more testing, more "accountability," more rigor. We apply even more of those things, from security systems to control of students' behavior through pharmaceutical drugs. That's a situation in which doing is only making things worse. You may have to go through a phase of de-programming, letting go of old habits, coming to stillness, before you can even see what the pattern of action was, and what alternatives there might be.”

“So much of our surprise, our fear, and our vindictiveness when faced with a pest is a result of our own ignorance. When we see a coyote in the street, a rat in our trash can, or a squirrel in the attic, we are at a loss. When we don't know what to do, we feel helpless. Vulnerable. When we realize how helpless we are, shame follows immediately behind. We want the problem—and the animal causing our shame—to go away.”