Quotes About Fulfillment

Almost sneezing is like almost having an orgasm. Sure it tickles getting there, but if you don't get the release you were hoping for at the end, then what's the point?

It should have been awkward. They'd taken their relationship from casual to over-the-top intimate in six-point-two seconds, without all the typical steps in between. But all Dani could think, wrapped in Carter's arms, was that finally she was right where she was supposed to be.

Say it, reader. Say the word 'quest' out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn't it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope.

Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!

We expect a great deal of each other - that our partner should be sexually appealing as well as a stable companion; an intellectual equal who will also be a good parent; someone with whom we are completely compatible, sharing a similar outlook, attitudes, values and pursuits who will remain solvent and never be boring - the perfect complement to how we imagine ourselves, or, more usually, would like to.

I felt myself to be as big as the night, free, a thing with no boundaries. The sky was infinite, the stars blazed like the exhilaration that filled me, their shifting pulses and shimmer a promise of time, space, eternity, all the things a woman never had. I was at last free to find my own size, and I was gigantic.

Beauty and perfection do not guarantee grace and fulfillment and are always sacrificed. Life itself seems a ritual of sacrifice, and the world the alter on which plants and animals lay down their own lives for the sustenance of others, and on which we lay our youth, our well-being, our loved ones, and finally our lives. I am an ignorant woman who has sacrificed all of these things but the last, and cannot say for whom or what I perform this unrelenting ritual.

Do you know what a blessing it is to make movies that make people happy?

You don't have to be perfect. Pretty happy is pretty great.

It gave her a feeling of her own power, to make something practical and beautiful just by using her own skill and creativity. It inspired her.

Women do amazing, creative, wonderful things.

It was a place where folks were happy simply to get on with life: raise their families, do good work, live decent lives.

So you keep running after the things you want, because you think they will satisfy you - and you truly do think that in the past they gave you satisfaction. But the satisfaction itself, the real feeling of it, somehow slips the net. It's anticipated and remembered but almost never experienced.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

What might we aspire to instead, if not more possessions? 'Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation,' argues the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. 'Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.'72 When it comes to consumerism, perhaps the poverty that we aim to conceal lies in our neglected relationships

Wherever and whenever we are excessive in our lives it is the sign of an as yet unknown deprivation,' argues the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. 'Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.

aspiration: whatever people consider necessary for a good life.

he derived the law of diminishing returns: the more of a thing that you consume (be it bananas or shampoo), the less you will desire still more of it.

had found a career they loved not by contemplating what would turn them on but by bumping into it someplace out in the world.

as long as you end up with the opportunities and credit you need. You

I'm a better mother if I'm also doing my work. Some women find a lot more satisfaction from doing the hardest job, which is being a mom. But I like my day job, so I juggle a lot.

Nobody asks about Beethoven's mother's own life—a fairly miserable round of pregnancy, childbirth, and child death. Was Maria Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven put on earth only to produce her wunderkind? Might she have had gifts of her own that she never got to offer the world?

If you look with envy or longing or inferiority-feeling at any other kind of life, you have lost your life, lost your Self.

It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can lead a rich life, and if you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, then your life will be safe, expedient and thin.