Internal Lives Quotes

I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives - those fountains of inconvenient feeling - and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick. ~ Cheryl Strayed

A book is maybe about 350 pages, and the prose allows for readers to get a glimpse into the internal lives of the characters. A screenplay is 120 pages, and it's all dialogue and action. The pacing of films is different, the structure is often different, and the internal lives of the characters must come across through the acting. Movies are just a different experience than reading - so it just depends on what an individual prefers. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it ... In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties ... and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine. ~ Clive Barker

I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

In general men keep their internal lives–and their more complex emotions–closely guarded, because either they don't understand them or they are afraid of being betrayed by them. ~ Michael R. French

Passion is what gives sense to our life. ~ Dalai Lama

I'm so proud of Maryland's firefighters, risking their lives to protect others, but we need to protect our protectors with the best equipment training and resources. ~ Barbara Mikulski

The tabloids create their own stories about people's lives that don't exist. ~ Elizabeth Olsen

We all live in a society where someone who lives right across hasn't eaten and you don't know it or you are having problems where you are close to suicide and no one knows; everyone is going about their duty and thinking everything is fine. It's a dual world we live in and there is so much going on and yet it is not so obvious because we all live in our individual worlds. ~ Juliet Asante

Whatever response we draw, we've got to know this: evangelism is not easy. It's not supposed to be. It's challenging to tell someone that he or she is lost, in danger of coming judgment, and in need of wholehearted repentance. That's not a light and airy message. It's a world-changing message, one that calls our entire lives into question. It's a loving message, but love in a biblical sense is not mushy or weak. Biblical love is transformative, powerful, renewing, redeeming, cleansing. ~ Owen Strachan

The years move forward and everyone is attending to their life's priorities, focusing on how to be happy, make a living, raise a family. The years turn into decades and sooner or later, (hopefully later) sickness or accidents happen and all are again confronted with the big questions: Why? What's next? What has this life that I've lived been about? As one begins to consider their own eventual departure: What have I been able to do to make things a little better? What have I passed along to make others' lives more beautiful? ~ Gene O'Neil

Surpanakha, Ahalya, Renuka, Urmila - each one had a story of her own. Each one had followed a path of her own. Her path, her way, was hers alone.
Sita had learnt what she could from their experiences. At first, she felt only disdain and anger for them. Later, when she understood that the anguish in their lives was similar, she felt a camaraderie, a companionship with them. When Sita heard the sufferings of others, she realized that she was not alone. The awareness that she was one of them gave her strength. And it was that strength which enabled her to withstand the disgrace and bear her children, to give them a happy childhood and to train them in all the skills. ~ Volga

If you're a leader, people's lives should be better because of the influence you've had along the way. ~ Tony Dungy

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.
I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness. ~ Anne Rice

In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus.

Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there's a certain comfort in knowing that there's a Plan.

Natasha is different. She believes in determinism- cause and effect. One action leads to another leads to another. Your actions determine your fate. In this way she's not unlike Daniel's dad.

Daniel lives in the nebulous space in between. Maybe he wasn't meant to meet Natasha today. Maybe it was random chance after all.

But.

Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable. ~ Nicola Yoon

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail for replacement in as many decades ~ Aldo Leopond

The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.
We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its ~ Leo Tolstoy

The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another's lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. ~ Sebastian Junger

People should not have to sacrifice so much of their personal lives, hopes, dreams and goals just to keep up with corporate pressured morebetterfaster. And tomorrow's workforce won't. ~ Bill Jensen

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books
whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. ~ Cecelia Ahern

To transform the world, help people, lift others up, change lives. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

There is a history in all men's lives. ~ William Shakespeare

What I loved in my old life--I haven't forgotten--it lives in my spine. ~ Leonard Cohen

I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren't really public servants. ~ Eugene Jarecki

In the past, humans hesitated when they took lives, even non-human lives. But society had changed, and they no longer felt that way. As humans grew stronger, I think that we became quite arrogant, losing the sorrow of 'we have no other choice.' I think that in the essence of human civilization, we have the desire to become rich without limit, by taking the lives of other creatures. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

In choosing a bare bones existence, we are enriched, and can redefine success as an internal process rather than an outward display of wealth and power. ~ Kathleen Norris

As a woman lives them, she will understand more and more of these interior feminine rhythms, among them the rhythms of creativity, or birthing psychic babies and perhaps also human ones, the rhythms of solitude, of play, of rest, of sexuality, and of the hunt. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet. ~ Audre Lorde

The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our minds. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love.
So much meaning attached to this one little word. People bandied it about freely, using it to
describe their attachments to possessions, pets, vacation destinations, and favorite foods. In the
same breath they then applied this word to the person they considered most important in their
lives. Wasn't that insulting? Shouldn't there be some other term to describe deeper emotion? ~ Alexandra Adornetto

It would be very interesting to speculate on what the human imagination is going to do with a frontierless world where it must seek its inspiration in uniformity rather than variety, in sameness rather than contrast, in safety rather than peril, in probing the harmless nuances of the known rather than the thundering uncertainties of unknown seas or continents. The dreamers, the poets, and the philosophers are after all but instruments which make vocal and articulate the hopes and aspirations and the fears of a people.

The people are going to miss the frontier more than words can express. For four centuries they heard its call, listened to its promises, and bet their lives and fortunes on its outcome.

It calls no more... ~ Walter Prescott Webb

We add value to our lives by giving without expectations; we add meaning to our lives by loving unconditionally. ~ Debasish Mridha

We crave nothing less that the perfect story; And while we chatter or listen all our lives to a din of craving – jokes, anecdotes, novels, dreams, films, plays, songs, half the words of our days – We are satisfied only by the one short tale we feel to be true; History is the will of a just God who knows us. ~ Reynolds Price

Hershey Pennsylvania was self-proclaimed as the "Sweetest Place On Earth," but less advertised than chocolate, it was also home to one of the state's largest Children's Hospitals. The streets lined with Hershey Kiss–shaped streetlamps that led excited children and families on vacation to chocolate tour rides and rollercoasters were the same exact streets that led anxious children and families to x-rays and MRIs on the worsts days of their lives.
Chocolate was being created on the same street that childhood diseases were being diagnosed. And that was life. The sweetest of sensations and the deepest of devastations live next door to each other. ~ Tessa Shaffer

People and birds were alike. Things happened that hurt them or made their lives harder. All the time. But losing someone or something important didn't mean the end of everything. It meant you had to find a new way to do things. ~ Suzanne Goldsmith

Walls tagged with graffiti (one such piece of tagging: a stencil of a familiar Sith Lord's helmet with the phrase beneath it reading VADER LIVES). ~ Chuck Wendig

The trouble with us is that we try to find happiness where it does not exist, in transient, impermanent things; we try to find it in the gratification of desire; we seek it in animal pleasure. Happiness lives in giving, in doing, not in getting, in grasping. ~ Orison Swett Marden