realizing Quotes

“I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.”

“Papa’s life ended at Manzanar . . . Until this trip I had not been able to admit that my own life really began there.”

“It was lovely to realize that while the fat farmer was sitting up there on the hill waiting for them to starve, he was also giving them their dinner without knowing it.”

“I realized that today I truly understood my purpose as Ellie: not just to Find people but to save them.

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all.”

“Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how.”

“All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile.”

“In that sheltered, gentle life that seemed far away, the girl would have believed her mother. She used to believe everything her mother said. But in this harsh new world, the girl felt she had grown up. She felt older than her mother. She knew the other women were saying the truth. She knew the rumors were true. She did not know how to explain this to her mother. Her mother had become like a child.”

“I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”

“As we got older, I didn’t seem to exist, except in relation to her.”

“It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you--religion, pride, anything--it’s when you realise that you dont need any aid.”

“Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.”

“You can run and run as fast and as far as you like, but the truth is, wherever you run, there you are.”

“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.”

“once you begin to realize that they’re just like everyone else you’ve met before”

“It was if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless.”

“These are the things that make it real. The things that bring it home.”

“But I’ve come to realize that failure is a process. If you flunk a test, it doesn’t mean you failed a one-time event. The F shows that you neglected the process leading up to the test.”

“I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.”

“You want to write me off? Try. Just realize when you’re cutting off the plank upon which you stand, which end of it is nailed to the ship.”

“Wilson felt the pleasure of amusement. Whoever spoke was wrong, of course - as would be established soon enough when the engine was examined and they checked his wound more closely. Then they’d realize that he’d saved them all.”

“Trixie realized something. Trixie turned to her daddy and said, ‘Aggle flaggle klabble!’ ”

“His thoughts began to race like mad. He was scared and worried. Being helpless, he felt hopeless. He imagined all the possibilities, and eventually he realized that his only chance of becoming himself again was for someone to find the red pebble and to wish that the rock next to it would be a donkey.”