Quotes About Balance

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, 'I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.

I could very calmly go wild.

That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very comprising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

This light-shouldered boy could jitterbug, old style, and would; he was more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We jitterbugged...Only the strenth in our fingertips kept us alive. If they weakened or slipped, his fingertips or mine, we'd fall spinning backward across the length of the room and out through the glass French doors to the snowy terrace, and if we were any good we'd make sure we fell on the downbeat, snow or no snow.

What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. —Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, "Of Beauty

A country with two kings will always falter.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

It's wrong to live in nature, unless you want to live like an animal.

That's how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.

I believe that you can't know courage without conquering fear, and you can't really know joy without knowing sadness.

She was a very good cook and also believed that color combinations of the food on your plate were important: It isn't very interesting to eat a plate full of white, therefore it can't be very good for you either.

My final thought now is that as in religion and the arts, so in politics; if men do not balance their feelings and intelligence they lose command of both - and worse still, of their object.

I think we all have light and dark inside us.

It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

There is only one life; it is therefore perfect.

I came to think of it as a kind of zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up.

Life works better when we know how to glance at things but gaze at God.

It's what we wrestle with every single day. The intersection of comfort, danger, and safety. The balancing act between vulnerability and shame. The opportunity (or the risk) to do art. The willingness to take responsibility for caring enough to make a difference and to have a point of view.

Instead of wondering when you're next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life that you don't need to escape from.

Sometimes, we're so focused on being consistent that we also lower the bar on amazing.