Top 88 Will Schwalbe Quotes
#1. SThat's enriched my life more than I can say. Of course you could do more - you can always do more, and you should do more - but still, the important thing is to do what you can, whenever you can.
Will Schwalbe
#2. I gave people who didn't know what to say the best advice I could muster, which was that it was better to say anything rather than pretend that nothing was wrong. My hunch was that Mom would simply appreciate knowing that people were thinking of her.
Will Schwalbe
#3. Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.
Will Schwalbe
#5. I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time. Yet
Will Schwalbe
#6. asked: "And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?" "Of course not - I'd read it first. I don't think I could have stood the suspense if I hadn't known what was going to happen. I'd have been way too worried.
Will Schwalbe
#7. 1. Ask: "Do you want to talk about how you're feeling?" 2. Don't ask if there's anything you can do. Suggest things, or if it's not intrusive, just do them. 3. You don't have to talk all the time. Sometimes just being there is enough. The
Will Schwalbe
#8. We're all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.
Will Schwalbe
#9. He was the smartest and best-read person any of us had every known, but he wore his learning so lightly and had such curiosity about other people that he had the ability to make everyone around him feel smart and well-read.
Will Schwalbe
#11. You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you're proud of them too.
Will Schwalbe
#12. I needed to remind myself that good news and bad news are often relative to your expectations, not anything absolute.
Will Schwalbe
#13. I realized then that for all of us part of the process of mom's dying was mourning, not just her death, but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been.
Will Schwalbe
#14. Oh, dear
did I forget to mention that you can, indeed, have it all, but you need a lot of help!
Will Schwalbe
#15. It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.
Will Schwalbe
#16. Why did I always need to do something, like referring one person to another, just for the sake of doing something, when sometimes, perhaps, it was better to do nothing?
Will Schwalbe
#17. It was the women of afghanistan,my mother believed,who-once they'd been granted access to books and education- would be the salvation of the country
Will Schwalbe
#18. Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs.
Will Schwalbe
#19. Yes," Mom said. "People may want to kill themselves. But no one wants to be depressed, or in pain, or lonely, or hurt.
Will Schwalbe
#20. Books have played a role in almost every one of the world's great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.
Will Schwalbe
#21. Books speak to us thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else's. There's one questions I think we should ask one another a lot more often, and that's "what are you reading?
Will Schwalbe
#22. What are you reading? isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, Who are you now and who are you becoming?
Will Schwalbe
#23. We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.
Will Schwalbe
#24. But people can be cruel in lots of ways, some very subtle.
Will Schwalbe
#25. Also, how could anyone who loves books not love a book that is itself so in love with books?
Will Schwalbe
#26. The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.
Will Schwalbe
#27. Why didn't this one say this, or tell someone that, or let anyone know she or he was so unhappy, so lonely, so scared? Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words. WHEN
Will Schwalbe
#28. When you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.
Will Schwalbe
#29. Books provided much-needed ballast - something we both craved, amid the chaos and upheaval ...
Will Schwalbe
#30. Connelly writes, "As long as there is paper, people will write, secretly, in small rooms, in the hidden chambers of their minds, just as people whisper the words they're forbidden to speak aloud." In
Will Schwalbe
#31. I asked: "And I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?" "Of course not - I'd read it first.
Will Schwalbe
#32. And my first item on each day's list is this: Wake up. If I can check that off, I've already done something and can get on with the business of living and trying to honor the memory of those I love who are no longer here.
Will Schwalbe
#33. The thing about Americans," she said, "is that you're very concerned about everything all the time.
Will Schwalbe
#34. Books had always been a way for my mother and me to introduce and explore topics that concerned us but made us uneasy, and they had also always given us something to talk about when we were stressed or anxious.
Will Schwalbe
#35. Often we feel the need to say that a book isn't just about a particular time or place but is about the human spirit. People say this of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, or Night by Elie Wiesel, or A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.
Will Schwalbe
#36. Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor.
Will Schwalbe
#37. But it takes so little to help people, and people really do help each other, even people with very little themselves. And it's not just about second chances. Most people deserve an endless number of chances.
Will Schwalbe
#38. If heathen prayers were indeed the best of all, then mine should count big time.
Will Schwalbe
#39. In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.
Will Schwalbe
#41. I particularly like that last phrase," Mom said. "About protecting your own happiness.
Will Schwalbe
#42. If you stayed at home, you might not get the opportunity to go to that place again. But if you went, you could always com back.
Will Schwalbe
#44. How does a doctor tell you that it's over, that there are things they could do but probably shouldn't, and that if your aim is quality of life and not quantity of life, there simply are no good next treatments?
Will Schwalbe
#45. That's one of the amazing things great books like this do - they don't just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.
Will Schwalbe
#46. She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done.
Will Schwalbe
#47. Good books often answer questions you didn't even know you wanted to ask.
Will Schwalbe
#48. How great, I thought, to honor people while they are still alive.
Will Schwalbe
#49. He's also able to accept death. He's not happy about it, but he's perfectly calm. When I stop all this treatment, it will be because it's time to stop.
Will Schwalbe
#50. But it's one thing to feel that a book can speak beyond its particular time and place to something universal, and another to ignore the circumstances and time in or about which it was written.
Will Schwalbe
#51. The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett
Will Schwalbe
#52. That's one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we can all talk about when we don't want to talk about ourselves.
Will Schwalbe
#53. Reading and naps, two of life's greatest pleasures, go especially well together.
Will Schwalbe
#54. I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.
Will Schwalbe
#55. The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention ...
Will Schwalbe
#56. joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they've realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.
Will Schwalbe
#57. Throughout her life, whenever Mom was sad or confuse or disoriented, she could never concentrate on television, she said, but always sought refuge in a book. Books focused her mind, calmed her, took her outside of herself; television jangled her nerves.
Will Schwalbe
#58. When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter
they wanted books for their children. (quoting his mother)
Will Schwalbe
#59. I like books. I don't read them. But I like them.
Will Schwalbe
#60. Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility
that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn't decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary. Not the road less traveled but the road with the exit ramp.
Will Schwalbe
#61. I think it's because it shows that people
or hobbits, as the case may be
can find strength they didn't know they had.
Will Schwalbe
#62. The truth is that people never realize their lives are about to change in unforeseen ways
that's just the nature of unforeseen ways.
Will Schwalbe
#63. If I'd waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.
Will Schwalbe
#64. Everyone doesn't have to do everything," she told me. "People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do. I wouldn't trade that for anything.
Will Schwalbe
#65. Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.
Will Schwalbe
#66. You can only do what you can, and what doesn't get done, just doesn't get done.
Will Schwalbe
#67. The Need to Read
"Reading books remains one of the best ways to engage with the world, become a better person and understand life's questions, big and small.
Will Schwalbe
#68. And there's something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don't know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.
Will Schwalbe
#69. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don't think I'll ever get over Melanie's death in Gone With the Wind. But I'm still so glad I got to know her.
Will Schwalbe
#70. The world is complicated,' she added. 'You don't have to have one emotion at a time.
Will Schwalbe
#71. Books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in human conversation.
Will Schwalbe
#72. Two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.
Will Schwalbe
#73. I'm talking about those novels where the characters aren't really interesting and you don't care about them or anything they care about. It's those books I won't read anymore. There's too much else to read
books about people and things that matter, books about life and death.
Will Schwalbe
#74. The apartment is an oasis - of civility, kindness, and elegance.
Will Schwalbe
#75. I can't see giving up real books," she said. "And I love that I can give away my books after I've read them. Think of the first edition of The Magic Mountain I'm giving Nico. It was printed along with the first copy that went to Mann himself. It's got a history.
Will Schwalbe
#76. Mindfulness - it isn't a trick or a gimmick. It's being present in the moment. When I'm with you, I'm with you. Right now. That's all. No more and no less.
Will Schwalbe
#77. There's never a good excuse for not doing anything -
Will Schwalbe
#78. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence.
Will Schwalbe
#79. Kabat-Zinn writes, "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." OBAMA
Will Schwalbe
#80. For this day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow.
Will Schwalbe
#81. All over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter - they wanted books for their children.
Will Schwalbe
#82. Reading isn't the opposite of doing, it's the opposite of dying.
Will Schwalbe
#83. Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.
Will Schwalbe
#84. Trust is all about instinct. If you had all the facts, you wouldn't need trust. Trust is what is required in the absence of proof. But I believe you can strengthen your instincts by testing them; every time you prove yourself right or wrong, they grow stronger.
Will Schwalbe
#85. Mom's reaction to this chaos isn't a surprise. No matter how high the bill that she is paying or that Medicare is paying for her, she will say to me or herself: "What happens to all the people who can't afford this? It's just not fair." Universal
Will Schwalbe
#86. they would soon be old enough to read The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and eventually Iris Murdoch and Alan Bennett. They could all be readers, and maybe even uncommon ones.
Will Schwalbe
#87. And I'm also talking about kindness, not just about being nice. You can be gruff or abrupt and still be kind. Kindness has much more to do with what you do than how you do it.
Will Schwalbe
#88. Reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose
electronic or printed or audio
is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation.
Will Schwalbe
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