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Exlpore more Healing quotes

"Sometimes people in abusive situations think they're responsible for the other person's happiness or that they're going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it's not all up to you to make someone else happy."

"I managed to ask a question that had been burning inside me. "Do you still love her? Rose? Along with not knowing what it felt like to be in love, I also didn't know how long it took to recover from love.Adrian's smile faded. His gaze turned inward. "Yes. No. It's hard to get over someone like that. She had a huge effect on me, both good and bad. That's hard to move past. I try not to think about her much in terms of love and hate. Mostly I'm trying to get on with my life. With mixed results, unfortunately."

"It's affirming that we can look at any experience from the fullness of our being and get past the shame we carry."

"When we respond to our pain and suffering with love, understanding, and acceptance-for ourselves, as well as others- over time, we can let go of our anger, even when we've been hurt to the core. But that doesn't mean we ever forget."

"You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight-and smile at your own past sorrows."

"When we are in constant pain, we cannot empathize with others, nor can we help them. It is only when we allow ourselves to open up to our own nourishment that we are free to feed the rest of the world. And thus, to attend to one's own suffering is the most selfless act."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit

"But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss."

"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."

"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."

"Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act."

"Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other."

"Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met."

"The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

"Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist."

"I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands."

"How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"
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