Rising Above It Quotes

Years ago I asked my friend, the great actress Ruth Gordon, to articulate in a few words the secret to her indomitable, unsinkable spirit. Her reply was a gift that became a mantra for me:

"It takes courage.
It takes believing in it.
It takes work.
It takes rising above it.
It takes me liking you, and you liking me.
It takes the dreaming soul of the human race that wants it to go right.
Never stop dreaming.
Think about it. ~ Gloria Vanderbilt

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot strap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel up climb. ~ Betty Smith

Yet another form of rest, perhaps the most essential, is "transcendence" – rising above it all, usually in the form of meditation, contemplation, or prayer. At least some of your transcendent time should be aimed at taking you out of all ordinary thinking, into pure consciousness, pure being, pure unity, or oneness with God. ~ Elaine N. Aron

And rising above it all doesn't mean we are better than others, it means we have made the choice to be better inside out. It means we have opted for forgiveness, dropped the drama, the pity, and everything else that dwells in a lower vibe.
It isn't complicated.
Rise. ~ Debbie Lynn - 360 Degrees Full Circle

We're living on the top of a pyramid,' he had said, 'supported by the massive base, rising above it, above everything that has made it possible. We're responsible for nothing, not the structure itself, not anything above us. We owe nothing to the pyramid, and are totally dependent on it. If the pyramid crumbles and returns to dust, there is nothing we can do to prevent it, or even to save ourselves. When the base goes, the top goes with it, no matter how elaborate the life is that developed there. The top will return to dust along with the base when the collapse comes. If a new structure is to rise, it must start at the ground, not on top of what has been built during the centuries past. ~ Kate Wilhelm

Despite our disapproval with what God allows us to endure, he still remains the same God that is not interested in our convenience, as much as our character. ~ Shannon L. Alder

The fact that beauty is at one and the same time without cost and above price, robs it of the curse of possessiveness. ~ Alice Hegan Rice

When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy. ~ Barry Hannah

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
-MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu. ~ John Richard Stephens

He pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot's description of Orpheus's gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Pg. 112-113

And he had other assets; one of them -- you'll be surprised at this -- was sin...Whatever it was, Patrick said how it weighed on him. He also exploited it -- because it enabled him to meet people on an equal footing. He was able to say, "Look, I'm not above you. I have my faults, too. I've done terrible things." Just because someone had once sinned, he said, didn't mean they were bad through and through. And that was part of his work in life -- to show that people might sin and still go on to live good lives. ~ Frank Delaney

Effective leaders....always rise to a challenge. That's one of the things that separates winners from whiners.....Walton rose above it by solving his problems with creativity and tenacity.


Anyone who expects the road to be easy will continually find himself in trouble. ~ John C. Maxwell

And then the world stopped and there was nothing but Rose as she slipped from the crowd to stand before him. Grey forgot about Lady Devane. He forgot about everyone but her.
She wore a mask, but even if he hadn't recognized the hair and the dress he would have known it was her. He knew her scent, the shape of her mouth. He recognized her by the way his heart rejoiced at her nearness.
She stared at him, her mask doing nothing to conceal her wonder. "Why are you here?"
Grey smiled down at her. Did she notice that he'd pinned the rosette from the gown she'd worn their first night together to his lapel? "Because I hold you above my horse, my fortune, and my pride."
Her brow puckered. "I beg your pardon?"
"Those were the traits you said you required in a husband, were they not?"
Her face relaxed, and he thought he saw a glimmer of understanding in her dark eyes. "Yes. I believe they were. You came here just to tell me that?"
He laughed. Her face was so bright below the edge of her mask, her eyes damp and warm. It broke is heart-and buoyed it as well-to know he was responsible for all of that. "No. I came here to dance with my wife. And to do this." He took her face in his hands and kissed her in front of the entire ballroom. He didn't care about the gasps or that everyone could see. He didn't care what they said or whether or not his behavior was proper.
He was a duke, damn it. A scandalous one at that.
When he lifted his head, Rose's e ~ Kathryn Smith

I want to love somebody because I want to be loved. In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of the wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home. I have lived in boxes above, below, and down the hall from girls who think hard, feel similarly, and long companionably, and I have not bothered to cultivate them because I did not want to, could not, sacrifice the time. People know who I am, and the harder I try to know who they are, the more I forget their names - I want to be alone, and yet there are times when the liquid eye and the cognizant grin of a small monkey would send me into a crying fit of brotherly love. I work and think alone. I live with people, and act. I love and cherish both. If I knew now what I wanted I would know when I saw it, who he was. ~ Sylvia Plath

If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else." "I know. An overwhelming passion for it." "No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong. ~ Anthony De Mello

To maintain an opinion because it is thine, and not because it is true, is to prefer thyself above the truth. ~ Ralph Venning

Knowing God is a matter of grace. It is a relationship in which the initiative throughout is with God - as it must be, since God is so completely above us and we have so completely forfeited all claim on his favor by our sins. ~ J.I. Packer

The Relics"

I slipped them into my friend's palm  -  
the tiny crucifix, and dove,
from off my mother's pendant watch  -  
and I asked her to walk them up through the brush
toward timberline, and find a place
to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now,
she writes, "I walked up the canyon at dusk,
warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon,
came to an outcrop, above a steep
drop  -  far below, a seasonal
creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder
and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the
love in the world, and I sent the talismans
flying off the cliff. They were so small,
and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or
heard them land." My mother is where
I cannot find her, she is gone beyond
recall, she lies in her sterling shapes
light as the most weightless bone in the body, her
stirrup bone, which was ground up
and sown into the sea. I do not know
what a soul is, I think of it
as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she
is wild now with it, she touches and is
touched by no one knows  -  down, or
droppings of a common nighthawk,
root of bird's foot fern, antenna of
Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the
huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was
something deeply right about
the physical elements  -  atoms, and cells,
and marrow  -  of my mother's body,
when I was young, and now her deli ~ Sharon Olds

A father would do well, as his son grows up, and is capable of it, to talk familiarly with him; nay, ask his advice, and consult with him about those things wherein he has any knowledge or understanding. By this, the father will gain two things, both of great moment. The sooner you treat him as a man, the sooner he will begin to be one; and if you admit him into serious discourses sometimes with you, you will insensibly raise his mind above the usual amusements of youth, and those trifling occupations which it is commonly wasted in. ~ John Locke

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling ... A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually-that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too- but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

At last, the details finally settled, Abbey found herself coming to terms with the inevitable: the whole lot of them would go to Cape Cod. It was a dizzying prospect. Thirteen years ago she had said goodbye once and for all to the only man she had ever loved. Now she was setting out with him on a vacation, accompanied by a young woman determined above all else to become his wife. ~ Emily Ann Benedict

Technically,' I said, I'm not breaking any of the Laws of Magic. I'm not robbing you of your will, so I'm clear of the Fourth Law. And you didn't get loose, so I'm clear of the Seventh Law. The Council can bite me.'
The bone ridges above Chauncy's eyes twitched. 'Surely, that is merely a colorful euphemism, rather than a statement of desire.'
'It is. ~ Jim Butcher

Prayer is not merely coming to God to ask something from him. It is above all fellowship with God and being brought under the power of his holiness and love, till he takes possession of us and stamps our entire nature with the lowliness of Christ, which is the secret of all true worship. ~ Andrew Murray

Everyone thinks they are above average, which is statistically impossible. There have to be below average writers. But nobody sees themselves that way. That means there are a whole lot of bad writers out there, who don't even know it. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Just as the sun disappeared behind a large gray cloud, a white sedan crept slowly along the long twisted road. A wall of trees on either side of the road gave the appearance that the only way out was to forge ahead. The black pavement weaved, rounding bends, up and down small rolling hills. If someone were to look at the scene from above, it would appear similar to a white rat running through a large maze, no doubt on its way to find the cheese. ~ Jill Sanders

The glory of His Father which our Lord sought above all else on earth is still the object of all His desires in the Blessed Sacrament. It is safe to say that Jesus Christ has clothed Himself with the sacramental state in order to continue honoring and glorifying His Father. ~ Peter Julian Eymard

The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: "He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture. ~ Derrick Jensen

Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn't live off fame, but rather deeds. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I think it's a facade - like a puppet show, you know? We can only see what's going on above the curtain. But with the halo on, it's like the curtains have been removed and there's a whole world of activity behind them. It makes me wonder if the world I thought I knew would even be possible without the Celestial ~ Shannon Dittemore

At the beginning of the year 1859 it was estimated that more than 120,000 native officers and soldiers had perished, and more than 200,000 civilian natives, who paid with their lives for their participation - often doubtful - in this insurrection. Terrible reprisals these; and perhaps, on that occasion, Mr. Gladstone had some reason on his side when he protested so energetically against them in Parliament. It was important, for the better understanding of our story, that the death-list on both sides should be given as above, to make the reader comprehend the unsatiated hatred which still remained in the hearts of the conquered, thirsting for vengeance, as well as in those of the conquerors, who, ten years afterwards, were still mourning the victims of Cawnpore and Lucknow. As ~ Jules Verne

Cotswold stone framed tiny sash windows gleaming with pale green paint. Wisteria vines twisted about the stone, bunches of purple flowers hanging thick and heavy with pollen. Above it all a tiled roof sagged with sage. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he'd never be another Shakespeare. ~ William Deresiewicz

I was still a little amazed that this was happening. That this, the thing that had seemed so impossible, so terrifying, so utterly beyond me, was happening. I was having fun. And that I was the one who made it happen. "I did it," I said out loud, sendind my voice up to the stars above me, not really caring if the others heard me. ~ Morgan Matson

There were many stories of girls - brave girls, foolish girls, reckless girls, pretty girls - who went into the woods searching for fortune or adventure, only to encounter a monster. Whether man or beast, the monster served as an allegory for all the things that could befall a girl who strayed from the path. If she were valorous and her heart was pure, the stories said, she could rise above being brought low by hubris.

But the stories never talked about the other girls - the ones who never came out of the woods and found themselves an unwilling bride to the venal darkness within those trees. The girls whose virtue was not quite enough to resist the seasoned allure of the wicked villain and who, as a result, found that men, like beasts, could devour the unwary, and that it could feel so good to be consumed. ~ Nenia Campbell

What is it that drives us outward to the stars above and to the shores below? Is it the security of knowing what's there? Or is it the adventure of finding it? ~ Chris Hogan

Once upon a time, a savage, violent time, humans, goblins, kobolds, Hödekin, and Lorelei lived side by side in the world above, feeding, fighting, preying, slaying. It was, as I had said, a dark time, and Man turned to dark practices to keep the blood tides at bay. Sacrifices, you see. Man turned against brother, fathers against daughters, sons against
mothers, all to appease the goblins. To stop the needless deaths, one man - one stupid, foolish man - made a bargain with the old laws of the land, offering himself as a sacrifice. ~ S. Jae-Jones

Look," I said, "there are plenty of people in the world who believe our destiny is in the hands of some old white guy sitting above us dealing out rewards and punishment like...some old white guy. What I believe makes more sense than that. Some things are meant to be. Fate, destiny, karma-whatever you want to call it. The universe has plans- we just aren't smart enough to know how it works. ~ Graeme Simsion