Quotes

“You could eat in the finest restaurants, […] soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.”

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”

“And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”

Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

[…] it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other.

“[…] maybe there are no easy paths. Maybe there are just paths. […] we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

And in doing so, she imagined what is was like to be free.”

She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best.

“She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.

“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as […] it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.”

“[…] she was feeling something new here. Or something old that she had long buried. [It] reminded her that she was, first and foremost, a human living on a planet. Almost everything she had done in her life […] – almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed – had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.”

“Because […] sometimes the only way to learn is to live.”

“It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human.”

“The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too.”

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices…Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.