Clinging Quotes - Page 2

• If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.

  Ralph Ellison

  Real, Teaching, Singing

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• Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of - and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system.... The heart must have something to cling to.

  Thomas Chalmers

  Heart, Mind, Vacancy

  Thomas Chalmers (1855). “Sermons: Select Works”, p.250

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• Fear has never helped anybody make good choices. It leads to clinging when we should be walking.

  Harriet Lerner

  Choices, Should, Walking

  FaceBook post by Harriet Lerner from Nov 16, 2015

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• Hey, I'm a Catholic deer hunter, I am happy to be clinging to my guns and my religion.

  Paul Ryan

  Gun, Catholic, Hunters

  "Romney Disparages Obama Voters In Hidden Video". "All Things Considered" with Audie Cornish, www.npr.org. September 17, 2012.

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• No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

  William Faulkner

  Grief, Men, Vices

  "Intruder in the Dust".

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• Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

  William McKinley

  Long Ago, Competition, Would Be

  William McKinley (2012). “A Supplement to A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents”, p.543, tredition

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• How much suffering and fear, and
  How many harmful things are in existence?
  If all arises from clinging to the "I",
  What should I do with this great demon?

  Shantideva

  Ego, Suffering, Demon

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• Deep down we all suspect that something is very wrong with the way we perceive life but we try very, very hard not to notice it. And the way we remain blind to our frightful condition is through an obsessive and pathological denial of being -- as if some dreadful fate would overcome us if we were to face the pure light of truth and lay bare our fearful clinging to illusion.

  Adyashanti

  Fate, Light, Trying

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• We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.

  Anne Sullivan Macy

  Teacher, Selfish, Live Life

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• I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.

  Pope Francis

  Hurt, Dirty, Church

  Pope Francis (2015). “The Spirit of St Francis: Inspiring Words on Faith, Love and Creation”, p.132, SPCK

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• Be what you are becoming without clinging to what you might have been; what you might yet be.

  Luce Irigaray

  Might, Becoming, Has Beens

  Luce Irigaray (1985). “This Sex which is Not One”, p.214, Cornell University Press

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• Freedom from clinging allows us bring love into all aspects of our life.

  Gil Fronsdal

  Aspect, Our Lives

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• When you are unhappy, discover what you are clinging to and let it go.

  Jan Chozen Bays

  Unhappy, Let It Go

  Jan Chozen Bays (2011). “How to Train a Wild Elephant: And Other Adventures in Mindfulness”, p.110, Shambhala Publications

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• There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the [christian] life. Because it is so natural, it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is. But its outworkings are tragic.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Evil, Doubt

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• Every second he breathed, the smell of the grass, the cool air on his face, was so precious: To think that people had years and years, time to waste, so much time it dragged, and he was clinging to each second.

  J. K. Rowling

  Thinking, Air, Years

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• A sloth once whispered in my ear and told me that when he is clinging to branches he closes his eyes and imagines that he's still a baby holding on to his mama.

  Ann Burton

  Baby, Eye, Sloth

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Art, Believe, Notion

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• The well adjusted make poor prophets. A pleasant existence blinds us to the possibilities of drastic change. We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. . . . Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware . . . still clinging to things that no longer exist.

  Eric Hoffer

  Views, Names, People

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• I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.

  Dorothy Parker

  Brave, Sake, Taste

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• October— You were sleeping so peacefully that I was loath to wake you. Duke Torquill, after demanding to know what I was doing in your apartment, has requested that I inform you of his intent to visit after ‘tending to some business at the Queen’s Court.’ I recommend wearing something clinging, as that may distract him from whatever he wishes to lecture you about this time. Hopefully, it’s your manners. You are truly endearing when you sleep. I attribute this to the exotic nature of seeing you in a state of silence. —Tybalt

  Mira Grant

  Queens, Sleep, Silence

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• He said that hate makes the world go round People are afraid of what they really want They make enemies of all the things that they would like to be They condition themselves to not embrace what they are Love is a clinging nausea I tried to disagree with him It was no use I never saw a more honest look in anyone's eyes.

  Henry Rollins

  Hate, Eye, Love Is

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• My Papa's Waltz: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

  Theodore Roethke

  Mother, Boys, Hands

  Theodore Roethke (2011). “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”, p.83, Anchor

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• To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.

  Henri Nouwen

  Spiritual, Loneliness, Garden

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• ...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

  William Faulkner

  Thinking, Two, People

  William Faulkner (1985). “Novels, 1930-1935”, Library of America

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• How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

  Antonin Artaud

  Dream, Sleep, Eye

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.11, Grove Press

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