Nella Larsen Quotes

“But there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness. Very positively she wanted it.”

“I think being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world. ”

“Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it. ”

“There's going to be positive and negative in anything in life.”

“It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plan of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so.”

“Influence is having people follow you because of what you represent,”

“I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist and I'm influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection," he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe.”

“Instead of falling to the ground like a heavy doll, as Kermin had seen the prisoners do at the Chetnik executions, his mother shrank into herself, a reverse blossoming, coming to rest in a sitting position, like a ruminative Buddha”

“Speak with intent so that you can lead with vision.”

“For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.”