Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Christina Baldwin
-
“ Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.”
-
“How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.”
-
“Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.”
-
“Friendship has no civil, and few emotional, rights in our society. ”
-
“Creatures of a very particular making, we need to know the cultural blinders that narrow our world view as well as the psychological blinders that narrow our view of our personal experience.”
-
“Wet beige knee-highs hang in my hands like wilted skins.”
-
“The spiritual journey is what the soul is up to while we attend to daily living.”
-
“Writing bridges the inner and outer worlds and connects the paths of action and reflection.”
-
“My journal is my life's companion.”
-
“Writing makes a map, and there is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked.”
-
“Contact with the sacred occurs in the stillness of the heart and mind. If there is any real destination to the spiritual quest, it is this point of silence, the middle of the spiral, the center of the self. ... The only map that does the spiritual traveler any good is one that leads to the center.”
-
“Wonder and despair are two sides of a spinning coin. When you open yourself to one, you open yourself to the other. You discover a capacity for joy that wasn't in you before. Wonder is the promise of restoration: as deeply as you dive, so may you rise.”
-
“Most of us have developed a fairly extensive vocabulary for describing pain, as though the journal were a doctor requiring much detail to make the correct diagnosis. The roundness of the spiritual journey cannot be expressed without developing an equally extensive vocabulary for talking to ourselves and others about the nature of wonder, joy, ecstasy, love, transfiguration.”
-
“Ritual is the act of sanctifying action — even ordinary actions — so that it has meaning: I can light a candle because I need the light or because the candle represents the light I need.”
-
“Ritual is the way we carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out.”
-
“Forgiveness is the act of admitting we are like other people. We are prone to make mistakes that cause confusion, inflict pain, and miscommunicate our intentions ... The only choice we have is to reconcile ourselves to our own flaws and the flaws of other people, or withdraw from the community.”
-
“Spiritual energy brings compassion into the real world. With compassion, we see benevolently our own human condition and the condition of our fellow beings. We drop prejudice. We withhold judgment.”
-
“Spiritual empowerment is evidenced in our lives by our willingness to tell ourselves the truth, to listen to the truth when it's told to us, and to dispense truth as lovingly as possible, when we feel compelled to talk from the heart.”
-
“Spiritual love is a position of standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.”
-
“The spiritual quest is that part of life which is the path within the path. Spirituality is the sacred center out of which all life comes, including Mondays and Tuesdays and rainy Saturday afternoons in all their mundane and glorious detail. ... The spiritual journey is the soul's life commingling with ordinary life. The fabric tears: the soul sees Monday, Monday sees the soul.”
-
“To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against.”
-
“Spiritual life is contractual.”
-
“ We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change.”
-
“When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both.”
-
“When you're stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.”
-
“... in writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience.”
-
“History is what scholars and conquerors say happened; story is what it was like to live on the ground.”
-
“Story is life seen through the honey jar, slightly distorted by personal experience, perception, inclination, and fancy. ... The fish gets a little bigger, the storm gets a little wilder, the love gets a little stronger ... ”
-
“Story is the mother of us all, for we become who we say we are.”
-
“This unceasing interplay between experience and narrative is a uniquely human attribute. We are the storytellers, the ones who put life into words.”
-
“Perhaps we wouldn't eat so much, or smoke, or drink so much if we were paying attention to ourselves. Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much if we were paying attention to each other. All these oral activities are trying to meet a need, and perhaps the greatest need is to be seen and heard.”
Christina Baldwin, U.S. writer, educator
(1946)