Quotes About Realization

I began to understand the true nature of my adversary.

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she's balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it's as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air.

I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.

Nearly every day I wake up shocked at how little in this world I comprehend.

WOMEN ON THEIR OWN RUN in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she'd balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

I've tried in this telling, time and time again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful. 515

Somehow it had come to pass that this man was her whole world, and she had failed to take his measure.

realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.

a photojournalist. Eventually she had come to understand

Denial has no survival value.' If you're going to play, you have to at least recognize what the game is.

The front door opened again. I glanced up and saw Karate. Christ, I thought. The gang's all here.

He imagined a frog in a pot, the water getting gradually warmer, the frog never noticing any of it. He imagined people telling themselves they would never be part of something corrupt, then telling themselves they would only be part of it to make it better, then telling themselves, hey, the thing wasn't corrupt in the first place, it was just the way of the world, they'd been naïve before and now they were savvy.

I had convinced myself I had become safe enough in Rio to see her. I realized now I'd been wrong. The disease I carried was still communicable.

fait accompli

That's genius, you see. The masterstroke that no one recognises until it's been pulled off.

When he comes to learn that he is in fact not related to the queen, and so is not the royal heir

the art of the possible.

Remember that seeing is believing puts the cart before the horse. Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.

A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away.

For months - sometimes even years, as I tried to explain to you - time hardly seems to exist. Then everything comes in a gasp.