Quiet Room Quotes

• Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Life, Letting Go, Fighting

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.248, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• 

  You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

  Franz Kafka

  Inspirational, Life, Wisdom

  "The Zürau Aphorisms". Book by Franz Kafka, 1931.

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• All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

  Blaise Pascal

  Inspirational, Peace, Hipster

  67 Copy quote

• I know of no painless process for giving birth to a picture idea. When I must produce, I retire to a quiet room with a supply of cheap paper and sharp pencils; my brain knows it's going to take a beating.

  Norman Rockwell

  Ideas, Giving, Brain

  Susan E. Meyer, Norman Rockwell (1981). “Norman Rockwell's people”, ABRAMS

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• Acceptance is a small quiet room.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Acceptance, Rooms, Quiet

  "Q&A: Cheryl Strayed, Author of Tiny Beautiful Things". Interview Molly McArdle, reviews.libraryjournal.com. April 30, 2012.

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• What is called zazen is sitting on a zafu [pillow] in a quiet room, absolutely still, in the exact and proper position and without uttering a word, the mind empty of any thought, good or wicked. It is continuing to sit peacefully, facing a wall, and nothing more. Every day.

  Taisen Deshimaru

  Wall, Mind, Wicked

  23 Copy quote

• He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Fire, Marching On, Mountain

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Lord of the Rings: One Volume”, p.536, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In doing zazen it is desirable to have a quiet room. You should be temperate in eating and drinking, forsaking all delusive relationships. Setting everything aside, think of neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. Thus having stopped the various functions of your mind, five up even the idea of becoming a Buddha.

  Dogen

  Drinking, Thinking, Ideas

  17 Copy quote

• The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.

  Eric Burns

  War, Heart, Destiny

  Eric Burns (1995). “The Joy of Books: Confessions of a Lifelong Reader”

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• Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom's Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.

  Anna Garlin Spencer

  Uncles, Writing, Achievement

  Anna Garlin Spencer (1908). “Woman's Share in Social Culture”

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• If you asked everybody in a quiet room what they think, they'd say, 'What does the NCAA do really well? We run championships really well.' And yet we have this thing we don't get involved in.

  Christopher R. Hill

  Running, Thinking, Ncaa

  6 Copy quote

• [As a screenwriter] I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Silence, Mind

  "A Qualified Farewell". Essay by Raymond Chandler (early 1950's), published in "The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler" edited by Frank MacShane, 1976.

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• Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

  Alice Sebold

  Quilts, Humble, Hands

  Alice Sebold (2014). “The Lovely Bones: Picador Classic”, p.229, Pan Macmillan

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• Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep
  Do not stand at my grave and weep,
  I am not there, I do not sleep.
  I am in a thousand winds that blow,
  I am the softly falling snow.
  I am the gentle showers of rain,
  I am the fields of ripening grain.
  I am in the morning hush,
  I am in the graceful rush
  Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
  I am the star shine of the night.
  I am in the flowers that bloom,
  I am in a quiet room.
  I am in the birds that sing,
  I am in each lovely thing.
  Do not stand at my grave and cry,
  I am not there. I do not die.

  Mary Elizabeth Frye

  Inspirational, Beautiful, Morning

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• Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Writing, Voice

  Fernando Pessoa (2007). “The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa”, p.321, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything.

  Alice Sebold

  Quilts, Hands, Color

  Alice Sebold (2014). “The Lovely Bones: Picador Classic”, p.229, Pan Macmillan

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• I like the idea of having a calm, quiet room to work on my [art] while knowing that outside there's noise and a lot happening. It's reassuring to know the 'everyday' continues even though inside the studio you feel so disconnected from it.

  Keren Ann

  Art, Ideas, Knowing

  5 Copy quote