Quotes About Sacrifice

Then my mother shocked me. She said, All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too. [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married...) to my father. You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place... and you have to understand how much I love your father.

for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let's enjoy this time. It's marvelous.

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.")

I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried- in neat little rows- the personal dreams they have given up for their families

The less you indulge yourself now, the more you can indulge yourself in the future, when you have made your fortune.

I have watched so many other people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.

I'm just so weary, Vivian. But I love this kid so much, sometimes I think it will break me in half. Is that the dirty trick? Is this how they get mothers to ruin their lives for their children? By tricking them into loving them so much? Maybe. It's not a bad strategy.

I love him and therefore I want to protect him -- even from me, if that makes sense. I didn't want to skip any steps of preparation, or leave anything unresolved that might reemerge later to harm us -- to harm him.

Because if you love and want something enough—whatever it is—then you don't really mind eating the shit sandwich that comes with it.

Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself.

Worse, their relationship with their work is often emotionally violent. You want to make something? You are told to open up a vein and bleed. Time to edit your work? You are instructed to kill your darlings.

I held on to those other sources of income for so long because I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life.

repeatedly give up their own health or their own time or their own best interests on behalf of what they perceive as the greater good—perhaps in order to consistently reinforce an imperative sense of specialness, of chosenness, of connection.

But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person—a person without honor—might take. Such instances may hurt, but that's why honor is a painful field.

Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged.

But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time -- everything.

So the question is not so much What are you passionate about? The question is What are you passionate enough about that you can endure even the most disagreeable aspects of the work.

The chickens look so plump and contented even in death that you imagine they offered themselves up for sacrifice proudly, after competing among themselves in life to see who could become the moistest and the fattest.

How do you negotiate once you've offered everything?

A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live? I was a bird who could dive and Felipe was a fish who can fly, we basically lived in midair. Diving and flying across oceans and continents in order to be together.

women all seemed to be living in constant service to their husbands. (They either served their men happily or with resentment—but they all served.)

But nothing advanced into the realm of what you might call true love. Maybe I just wasn't looking for it. Or maybe I was being spared from it. Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I've always witnessed.

Other people come here worshipping Eustace. They want to please him, so they let him take over their entire selves, and that's when the resentment starts to build. It builds slowly, over time. What wears people down here isn't the physical labor but the psychological stress of losing their identity.

Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love.