Quotes from TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES by Sue Monk Kidd

I'm enjoying every word of the book Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor

“My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.” 
― Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story


“The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.” 
― Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story


“We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.” 
― Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

"The Best Wave of Your Life is Still Out There"

My quote for the day:

I have notebooks and notebooks filled with quotes.  I've collected quotes since I was young.  I still have the original binders from grammar school and my diaries from fourth grade on, that are also full of quotes.

Quotes comfort and inspire me.  There is a truth in them that makes you feel like "yes, that is how I feel."

In 2008 I started collecting quotes in documents on the computer.  I start a new one each year and paste some of my most favorites of the year in the document.  They are random and do not necessarily relate to each other.  You can see when I was on a trend (for instance in fight for justice against the wrongful closure of Wright Library I had collected a bunch of library quotes.)  There are cooking quotes, writing quotes, but mainly quotes about living life.  There is a big variety.  I hope they inspire you as much as they inspired me.  -Maili

"Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter."

--Sharon Salzberg

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.  Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."  The 
Velveteen Rabbit

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”  -Aristotle

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one."  --C.S. Lewis

 “You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.” Charlotte, written by E.B. White in Charlotte’s Web

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”  -George Eliot

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us. –Epicurus, 3rd century BCE

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” –May Sarton

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” G. K. CHESTERTON

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. –Harriet Tubman

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. Henry David Thoreau

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. –Gloria Steinem

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. –Anatole France

“Nothing happens unless first we dream. Carl Sandburg

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. ALLAN K. CHALMERS

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. ANNE FRANK

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. ANNE FRANK

Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient  ARISTOTLE:

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful. –Albert Schweitzer

“I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” –Albert Schweitzer

There are no limits on how much the heart can love, the mind can imagine, or the human being can achieve.  –Lynn Cox

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again. And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children. --Pablo Casals (1876 - 1973)

Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that never was before and never will be again.  Pablo Casals (1876 - 1973)

The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one proposes to do. --Pablo Casals (1876 - 1973)

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance. –Pablo Casals

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it. –Pablo Casals

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all."  Dale Carnegie

“Give to the world the best you have and the best will come back to you.” ~ Madeline Bridges  

“For it is in giving that we receive.” –St. Francis of Assisi

“If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love's reach.” – Margaret Cho

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”  -Winston Churchill

“There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.” –Peyton Conway March -

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.  ~Cicero

Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library.  The only entrance requirement is interest.  ~Lady Bird Johnson

What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.  ~Archibald MacLeish, "The Premise of Meaning,"American Scholar, 5 June 1972

There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.  ~Andrew Carnegie

The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book.  You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library.  ~Lesley Conger

The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world - couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.  ~Malcolm Forbes

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.  I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.  ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"'There's no use trying,' Alice said.  'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen.  'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.  Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"

 --Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

 “An essential part of a good life comes from creating great memories from small moments together at the table.”  -- Alex Brennan-Martin

"It is about making room for the small, sweet moments that later loom large in memory.  it is about using our minds and our hands to nourish ourselves and those we love (or like, or want to know better), and finding surprising peace in the doing of it."  --Peace Meals

“Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”  Finian’s Rainbow

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. Edgar Allen Poe 

“But in this season it is well to reassert that the hope of mankind rests in faith.  As man thinketh, so he is.

Nothing much happens unless you believe in it, and believing there is hope for the world is a way to move toward it.”

--Gladys Taber

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."   -- Henry Ford

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

--Henry David Thoreau

“Along the way, she would discover that, sometimes, when you go looking for one thing, you find another.  And every now and then, your reward for persisting is that the other is better.”  Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting:  The Quest for a Carravaggio Masterpiece

"The true cook has, in his or her modest sphere, such pleasure in recipe making as the musician or poet in composition."

--Kitchen Cooks Oracle, London 1927

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."

George Bernard Shaw

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.  Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.  --Albert Schweitzer

"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can..."  --John Wesley

"The aim, if reached or not;  makes great the life,

Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate. -- Robert Browning"

“Look for what is good and you will find it!”

“No act of kindness, not matter how small, is ever wasted”  -- Aesop

"The pursuit is the reward."  -- Life is Good

Imagination is more important than knowledge...

Albert Einstein

“Imagination is the beginning of creation.  You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”

--George Bernard Shaw

Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. -Helen Keller

"Be great in act, as you have been in thought"

* --The Life and Death of King John, Act 5 Sc 1*

By William Shakespeare

“Everything you can imagine is real.” --Pablo Picasso

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

H. Auden

"In those quiet moments, when you are really being true to yourself, you will begin to recognize the strength in your bone marrow that has nothing to do with your attractiveness to someone else.  It is a strength composed of your own truths."  ---Lissa Young

“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.” -- JK Rowling

"When you get into a tight place and it seems that you can't go on, HOLD ON-- for that's just the place and the time that the tide will turn"  --Harriet Beecher Stowe

"The aim, if reached or not: makes great the life;

Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate."

--Robert Browning

"Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.  Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:  that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too.  All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.  A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.  I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:  'Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."  --W. H. Murray (widely misattributed to Goethe)

Excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend on how to begin Gratitude emails”

“Also try very very hard to do this:  Try to write five sentences of gratitude and e-mail them to me every morning.  Start your day with this, or end your day with this and you will be shocked at all the goodness that suddenly comes flooding into your life.  They can be as simple as "I'm grateful for the red geraniums in the window" or as major as "I'm grateful for the health of my children."

Here are five from me.  Send at least five back:

1.  I am grateful I will hold my cookbook in my hands in only two weeks.

2.  I am grateful we had enough miles to fly business class for free.

3.  I am grateful I saw three movies that I wanted to see in business class.

4.  I am grateful I read the book Darkness Visable by William Styron on the plane.

5.  I am grateful we made our flight.

6.  I am grateful that Kirby watered the plants while we were gone so my garden isn't dead.

7.  I am grateful the rains came in California to put out the horrible fires and that no houses burned down.

8.  I am grateful to have my computer back!  I missed it after two weeks of no computer.  The break was good, but I'm so grateful for computers because I can stay in touch with people I love!”

Maili Halme Brocke

mailibrocke@mac.com

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."

George Bernard Shaw \

Any ordinary favor we do for someone or any compassionate reaching out may seem to be going nowhere at first, but may be planting a seed we can't see right now. Sometimes we need to just do the best we can and then trust in an unfolding we can't design or ordain.

Sharon Salzberg, 

By prizing heartfulness above faultlessness, we may reap more from our effort because we're more likely to be changed by it.

Sharon Salzberg, O Magazine, The Power of Intention, January 2004

Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention.

Sharon Salzberg, O Magazine, The Power of Intention, January 2004

If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to recommit, to be whole-hearted once again.

Sharon Salzberg, 

Often we can achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don't give up after a mistake, when something doesn't come easily but we throw ourselves into trying, when we're not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished.

Sharon Salzberg, O Magazine, The Power of Intention, January 2004

We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it.

Sharon Salzberg, O Magazine, The Power of Intention, January 2004