Deborah Feldman famous quotes

If you are forced to confront your fears on a daily basis, they disintegrate, like illusions when viewed up close. Maybe being always protected made me more fearful, and I would later dip cautiously into the outside world, never allowing myself to be submerged completely, and always jerking back into the familiarity of my own life when my senses were overwhelmed. For years I would stand with a foot in each sphere, drawn to the exotic universe that lay on the other side of the portal, wrenched back by the warnings that sounded like alarm bells in my mind.
-- Deborah Feldman

#Fear #Feet #Years

As far as I can remember, I have always wanted everything from life, everything it can possibly give me. This desire separates me from people who are willing to settle for less. I cannot even comprehend how people's desires can be small, ambitions narrow and limited, when the possibilities are endless
-- Deborah Feldman

#Ambition #People #Giving

I'd rather believe in reincarnation than hell. The idea of an afterlife is much so more tolerable when returning is an option.
-- Deborah Feldman

#Believe #Ideas #Afterlife

If my mind cannot be tied down, if my dreams cannot be diminished, then no amount of restraints can really guarantee my quiet submission.
-- Deborah Feldman

#Dream #Mind #Guarantees

I can't bear the thought of living an entire lifetime on this planet and not getting to do all the things I dream of doing, simply because they aren't allowed. I don't think it will ever be enough, this version of freedom, until it is all-inclusive. I don't think I can be happy unless I'm truly independent.
-- Deborah Feldman

#Dream #Independent #Thinking

Some people simply use their faith as a lexicon of behavioral reasoning; without that they would be forced to face their own moral and ethical failings honestly according to a secular code of right and wrong.
-- Deborah Feldman

#People #Would Be #Lexicon

I am hungry for power, but not to lord over others; only to own myself.
-- Deborah Feldman

#Hungry #Lord

I resolve to venture into the city on my own. I look at maps in the library—subway maps, bus maps, and regular maps—and try to memorize them. I’m afraid of getting lost; no, I’m afraid of sinking into the city as in a quicksand, afraid of getting sucked into something I can never escape.
-- Deborah Feldman

#Cities #Trying #Library

The same hot lightning that burns your blood with passion–– cools your fears with peace.

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about - was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

There are times when fear is good. It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls.

Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.

I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night's sleep; the second kills.

Our first duty is to satisfy the spiritual master, who can arrange for the Lord's mercy. A common man must first begin to serve the spiritual master or the devotee. Then, through the mercy of the devotee, the Lord will be satisfied. Unless one receives the dust of a devotee's lotus feet on one's head, there is no possibility of advancement. Unless one approaches a pure devotee, he cannot understand the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Med students panic their first year when they learn all the diseases. It's not until the second year that they learn the cures.