Quotes About Fulfillment

The richness of the human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome.

What is true happiness? It's not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.

Out of this sorrowful experience I understand more fully all human strivings, thwarted ambitions, and the infinite capacity of hope.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing at all.

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

In my life, looking at other women who have been pregnant while writing, I always feel like it's kind of their most musical or the closest to themselves. I think for me it's such a validating moment, you know. I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I've been making music all my life.

I sing because I love singing. I perform because I love performing. I write because I actually enjoy writing.

I don't feel the need to prove myself by writing the next generational novel.

I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.

I like writing, and I enjoy the production part a lot, actually. It gives you longevity in a career, where you know sometimes you might not always have the time to do the parts you want to do.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I had definitely missed the literary development game with Paper Lantern Lit, and writing exclusively wasn't giving me complete fulfillment.

Each song is a small universe to me. Each song has a story of its own. Each has a full life to express in order to be complete, so it often happens that the building to a big crescendo feels right in the recording or writing process.

Of course having a baby derails the writing process for some time. And I will be the first to say that I have essentially no social life, because there's just nothing left after being a mom, professor, and writer. I used to be big into rock climbing. No more. A lot falls by the wayside.

I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on... I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

I actually feel I'm in a much better place than I've ever been because I'm thankful people still love the songs that I've written, and they seem to like me. And they come to the shows in droves, and they get all excited, and I can still hit all the notes, and I don't look terrible.

When I am dead and buried, on my tombstone I would like to have it written, 'I have arrived.' Because when you feel that you have arrived, you are dead.

Some of the best songs that I know are the ones I haven't written yet, and it doesn't even matter if I don't ever write them, because it's only small potatoes compared with the big picture.

I've only ever written about one thing in my life, which is the fact that we, as human beings, have a responsibility to one another and that it's important that we empathize with others, that we organize society so that we all become happier and we all get the life we really want.

I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.