Patterns Quotes - Page 14

• Juliet!' I whip around but not quickly enough. She's swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies.

  Lauren Oliver

  Doors, Body, Crowds

  Lauren Oliver (2010). “Before I Fall”, p.287, Hachette UK

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• One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

  Iain Banks

  Mistake, Should

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• Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, your awakening to truth can deepen. There’s less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that is witnessing what’s happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home. Rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning, you are actually spiraling toward freedom.

  Tara Brach

  Home, Emotional, Compassion

  Tara Brach (2013). “True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart”, p.73, Bantam

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• I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind. “At these times, I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.

  J. K. Rowling

  Memories, Focus, Feelings

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• Jordan followed, buttoning his jeans and muttering about how there was nothing strange about having a pattern of dancing penguins on your underwear.

  Cassandra Clare

  Jeans, Dancing, Underwear

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.1908, Simon and Schuster

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• If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!

  Alan Watts

  Race, Cells, Organization

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.34, Souvenir Press

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• Shame usually follows a pattern—a cycle of self-recrimination and lies that claims life after life. First, we experience an intensely painful event. Second, we believe the lie that our pain and failure is who we are—not just something we’ve done, or had done to us—and we experience shame. And finally, our feelings of shame trap us into thinking that we can never recover—that, in fact, we don’t even deserve to.

  Craig Groeschel

  Pain, Lying, Believe

  Craig Groeschel (2010). “The Christian Atheist: Believing in God But Living as If He Doesn't Exist”, p.50, Harper Collins

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• Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

  Pema Chodron

  Revenge, Heart, Practice

  Pema Chodron (2003). “Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion”, p.8, Shambhala Publications

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• Yes, I have patterns of love addiction. But I'm a woman. Of course I do.

  Emma Forrest

  Addiction, Courses

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• Duty is heavier than a mountain, Dai Shan.' That time, Lan did flinch. How long had it been since someone had been able to do that to him with mere words? He remembered teaching that same concept to a youth out of the Two Rivers. A sheepherder, innocent of the world, fearful of the fate laid out before him by the Pattern.

  Robert Jordan

  Teaching, Fate, Two

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• We draw our strength from the great oaks of the forest. As they take their nourishment from the soil, and from the rains that feed the soil, so we find our courage in the pattern of living things around us. They stand through storm and tempest. They grow and renew themselves. Like a grove of young oaks, we remain strong.

  Juliet Marillier

  Strong, Rain, Storm

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• I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sharp simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.

  Colm Toibin

  Heart, Simple, Clothes

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• I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

  Tana French

  Distance, Real, Heart

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• Connubial Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

  Stephen Dunn

  Order, Way, Language

  Stephen Dunn (2013). “Here and Now: Poems”, p.89, W. W. Norton & Company

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• And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman's self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree. The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences.

  Sheryl Sandberg

  Hurt, Self Esteem, Self Confidence

  Sheryl Sandberg (2014). “Lean In for Graduates”, p.39, Knopf

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• What I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself of all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake myself free of these accumulating experiences which were mine only by force of inertia required a violent effort. Now and then I lunged and tore at the net, but only to become more enmeshed. My liberation seemed to involve pain and suffering to those near and dear to me. Every move I made for my own private good brought about reproach and condemnation. I was a traitor a thousand times over.

  Henry Miller

  Pain, Moving, Destiny

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• Does anyone know why Will left?" Charlotte demanded, standing at the head of a long table around which the rest of them were seated. Cecily, her hands folded demurely before her, suddenly became very interested in the pattern of the carpet.

  Cassandra Clare

  Hands, Long, Doe

  Cassandra Clare (2014). “Clockwork Princess”, p.261, Simon and Schuster

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• We are all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand.

  Jojo Moyes

  Purpose, Cycles

  Jojo Moyes (2012). “Me Before You: A Novel”, p.115, Penguin

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• Vampires, fey folk, werewolves, Shadowhunters, and demons - these things made sense to Magnus. But the mundane world - it seemed to have no pattern, no form. Their quicksilver politics. Their short lives.

  Cassandra Clare

  Short Life, Vampire, Fey

  Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson (2013). “The Runaway Queen”, p.41, Simon and Schuster

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• If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow -- you are not understanding yourself.

  Bruce Lee

  Understanding, Shadow, Routine

  Bruce Lee, John Little (1997). “Jeet kune do: Bruce Lee's commentaries on the martial way”, Tuttle Publishing

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• I am a work in progress Dressed in the fabric of a world unfolding Offering me intricate patterns of questions Rhythms that never come clean And strengths that you still haven't seen

  Ani DiFranco

  Offering, Progress, Fabric

  Song: The Slant

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• We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy.

  Alan Watts

  Running, Stars, Fire

  Alan Watts (2010). “Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation”, p.92, New World Library

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• In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely.

  Trenton Lee Stewart

  Love, Beautiful, Book

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• Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.

  Mary Midgley

  Punishment, Hubris, Form

  Mary Midgley (2004). “The Myths We Live by”, p.104, Psychology Press

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• We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.

  Jeff Buckley

  Pain, Born, Cursed

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