Quotes by Dutch Authors - Page 9

Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears don’t hijack us. (For example, your fear at being flagged down by the police can turn instantly to gratitude when the cop warns you that there’s an accident ahead.) But the moment we feel trapped, enraged, or rejected, we are vulnerable to activating old maps and to follow their directions. Change begins when we learn to "own" our emotional brains. That means learning to observe and tolerate the heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations that register misery and humiliation. Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
Let your feelings flow freely, accept each one of them, know that they are your feelings and no one is to blame for them. Live from your essence and watch your feelings flow; only when you accept them can you understand the story of your life.
Patricia Selbert
Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” (p.97)
Bessel A. van der Kolk
But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.
Anne Frank
...Obyann, you're talking about the Landemere-Ramaldah border dispute of 1416. Damn it, man, that was in the time of our grandfathers.
Andrew Ashling
I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they’ve had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one family member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be - and not only you, but virtually the entire family - if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past - I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I used it as an example because it’s the one that most appeals to their imaginations - and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiselled into the war memorials.
Herman Koch
Specific parts of you personality may be angry and are usually easily evoked. because these parts are dissociated, anger remains an emotion that is not integrated for you as a whole person. Even though individuals with dissociative disorder are responsible for their behavior, just like everyone else, regardless of which part may be acting, they may feel little control of these raging parts of themselves.Some dissociative parts may avoid or even be phobic of anger. They may influence you as a whole person to avoid conflict with others at any cost or to avoid setting healthy boundaries out of fear of someone else’s anger; or they may urge you to withdraw from others almost completely.
Suzette Boon
Anger should be especially kept down in punishing, because he who comes to punishment in wrath will never hold that middle course which lies between the too much and the too little. It is also true that it would be desirable that they who hold the office of Judges should be like the laws, which approach punishment not in a spirit of anger but in one of equity.
Johannes Voet
Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster.
Geert Hofstede
The worst is, I remain so stone cold. Does this war make you an 'alive-dead person'? Is it not possible to remain yourself in this chaos? How long still?
Diet Eman
Despite everything, I believe people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
When your mind is rich in the wisdom, and your heart is sensitive and filled with love, you are a person, who can change the world.
Ehsan Sehgal
The polyglot is a linguistic nomad.
Rosi Braidotti
Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor's hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.
Baruch Spinoza
It is not, how one thinks. Indeed, it is, how one executes that.
Ehsan Sehgal
That’s very trusting.” Iris watches Anke search our backpacks.“We’re saving people’s lives. We thought we could be,”Anke says. I’m more fixated on her arm in my backpack than on what she’s saying, though. That bag is nearly empty, but it’s mine. She’s messing it up. Her hands might not even be clean.When she does stop, I immediately wish she hadn’t. “Denise,” she says, “I need to search your bed next.”My gaze flicks to my pillow. “I. I. Could I.”“She doesn’t like people touching her bed.” Iris stands, guarding me.“You’re touching it,” Captain Van Zand’s brother says.Iris shoots him a withering look. “I sat at the foot, which is the only place that’s OK for even me to touch, and I’m her sister.”Anke’s sigh sounds closer to a hiss. “Look, we have more rooms to search.”I squirm. No. Not squirm. I’m rocking. Back and forth. “Wait,” I say.“You can’t—” Iris goes on.“Just ’cause she’s too precious to—” the man argues.“Wait,” I repeat, softer this time, so soft that I’m not even sure Iris hears it. “Can I, can I just, wait. I can lift the sheets and mattress myself. You can look. Right? Is that good? Right? Is that good? If I lift them?” I force my jaw shut.No one says anything for several moments. I can’t tell if Anke is thinking of a counterargument or if she really is trying to make this work. Her lips tighten. “OK. If you listen to my instructions exactly.”“You’re indulging her?” Captain Van Zand’s brother says. “She’s just being difficult. Have you ever seen an autistic kid? Trust me, they’re not the kind to take water scooters into the city like she did.”“Denise, just get it done,” Anke snaps.I don’t stand until they’re far enough away from the bed, as if they might jump at me and touch the bed themselves regardless. I blink away tears. It’s dumb, I know that—I’m treating Anke’s hands like some kind of nuclear hazard—but this is my space, mine, and too little is left that’s mine as is. I can’t even face Iris. With the way she tried to help, it feels as though I’m betraying her by offering this solution myself.I keep my head low and follow Anke’s orders one-handed. Take off both the satin and regular pillowcases, show her the pillow, shake it (although I tell her she can feel the pillow herself: that’s OK, since the pillowcases will cover it again anyway)—lift the sheets, shake them, lift the mattress long enough for her to shine her light underneath, let her feel the mattress (which is OK, too, since she’s just touching it from the bottom) . . .They tell us to stay in our room for another hour.I wash my hands, straighten the sheets, wash my hands again, and wrap the pillow in its cases.“That was a good solution,” Iris says.“Sorry,” I mutter.“For what?”Being difficult. Not letting her help me. I keep my eyes on the sheets as I make the bed and let out a small laugh.
Corinne Duyvis
She unwinds her scarf, taking so long about it that I wonder if she expects me to respond. “You were following the rules,” I offer after a minute. It makes her words no more pleasant. Resentment. Was that how she’d looked at me? Then how am I supposed to trust how she looks at me now?My words elicit a thankful smile. “Mostly, though, I knew you could do the job. Did you ever know other autistic people?”I shake my head. I’d heard rumors about one teacher, but never asked him. Mom had encouraged me to find a local support group, but I’d never seen the appeal—or the need. It wouldn’t change anything. I had friends, anyway. Peopleonline, my fellow volunteers at the Way Station. I even got along with Iris’s friends.“Well, I did, and I feel like a fool for never recognizing your autism. I had autistic colleagues at the university. They were accommodated, and they thrived. One researcher came in earlier than everyone else and would stay the longest. I saw the same strengths in you once I knew to look for them. You’re punctual, you’re precise, you’re trustworthy. When you don’t know something, you either figure it out or you ask, and either way, you get it right. I wanted to give you the same chance my colleagues had, and that other Nassau passengers got. One of the doctors is autistic—did you know?” Els silences an incoming call. “Does that answer your question?
Corinne Duyvis
I mean: if you’re going outside to look for your sister, I get it.” Max goes silent. Maybe Mirjam’s death is hitting him now, maybe his voice will choke—but he goes on. “But if you’re going outside to help your mother . . .” He gestures helplessly at my injured arm. His fingers stop a centimeter away, hovering in midair. “Don’t risk it. Don’t risk you.”“She’s my mother.”“The captain will never let her on if she doesn’t even try. Not when there are so many people who haven’t had thechance to try. People we can use on the ship. People who have been on that waiting list forever.”There are a dozen things I want to say. But she’s mymother—as though that means as much as people pretend it does.She is trying, just in a different way—as though I’m convincing myself.I wasn’t on that waiting list, either.I might not be someone the ship can use, as much as I’m trying to be.
Corinne Duyvis
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Rutger Hauer
I've found out so much about electricity that I've reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain no
Pieter van Musschenbroek
Knowledge is a matter of knowing facts. Wisdom is a matter of understanding and applying principles. A certain amount of knowledge is necessary for wisdom, and without wisdom, knowledge is not only useless, it's dangerous.
Hilda van Stockum
Those women who had gone out with Germans were grabbed and treated very badly, often shaved totally bald so that everyone could see who they were. Some were taken prisoners. There had been so much suffering during the war because of the betrayal of those collaborators, so many killed and hurt because of what they had done to families, that the mood for revenge against the traitors was very high. It was not right, but it was understandable.
Diet Eman
Forgive me, God, for I'm about to sin like fuck.
Clarissa Wild
The world is evil only when you become its slave.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
All discrimination - whatever form it takes - is evil and that the world can go to pieces because of it.
Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper
As long as you remember that fighting evil doesn't necessarily make you good! Good and evil are each other's enemies, but they are often found close together.
Tonke Dragt
Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Genius is a sovereign power; it forms schools; it lays hold on the spirits of men, with irresistible might; and it exercises an immeasurable influence on the whole condition of human life. This sovereignty of genius is a gift of God, possessed only by his grace. It is subject to no one and is responsible to him alone who has granted it this ascendancy.
Abraham Kuyper
She wanted to tell him what happened wasn't really his fault, but she knew that wasn't the way this kind of guilt worked. Intellectually, he already knew that. It was his emotions that were tripping him up. The tangle of love and memory and what might have been.
Charles de Lint
There are many forms of poverty: economic poverty, physical poverty, emotional poverty, mental poverty, and spiritual poverty. As long as we relate primarily to each other's wealth, health, stability, intelligence, and soul strength, we cannot develop true community. Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.Living community in whatever form - family, parish, twelve-step program, or intentional community - challenges us to come together at the place of our poverty, believing that there we can reveal our richness.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
How can we embrace poverty as a way to God when everyone around us wants to become rich? Poverty has many forms. We have to ask ourselves: 'What is my poverty?' Is it lack of money, lack of emotional stability, lack of a loving partner, lack of security, lack of safety, lack of self-confidence? Each human being has a place of poverty. That’s the place where God wants to dwell! 'How blessed are the poor,' Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty.We are so inclined to cover up our poverty and ignore it that we often miss the opportunity to discover God, who dwells in it. Let’s dare to see our poverty as the land where our treasure is hidden.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
There are no words in that fleeting moment between hope and the knowledge. There is no way to express how a heart can burst and break at the same time, how the sun can cut through the darkness but will case shadows everywhere.
Marieke Nijkamp
Never risk in the dark to search the light. Conversely, be light and shine in the darkness as a moon.
Ehsan Sehgal
It's just that when you're standing beside an open window at twilight, you can say more toeach other than in bright sunshine. It's also easier to whisper your feelings than toshout them from the rooftops.
Anne Frank
Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.
Anne Frank
What do they say about meeting a bear in the woods? Oh right, you shouldn't. And to make sure you don't, you should make a lot of noise so that they'll will know where you are and keep their distance because, supposedly, they're as nervous of us as we are of them. Which is all goo, except this bear doesn't seem the least bit nervous. He's giving me a look like I'm Goldilocks, ate his porridge, broke his chair, slept in his bed, and now it's payback time."- Widdershins
Charles de Lint
I look at the sky and the dust that separates us from the stars that will be my home. I breathe in the night air, the rotten night air, and I miss, I miss, I miss.
Corinne Duyvis
As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.
Bessel A. van der Kolk
If you dont speak, they will know you know more than you're telling them. And if they know that, they'll find a way to get what you know out of you. Believe me, they'll get everything out, Willie. Don't have any qualms about it -- make your story good and make it believable. Silence won't work!" This was an expert giving me the best advice she could. From that point on, I worked hard not to remember the people I loved, to try instead to create another life, a false life...I tried to become a person concerned only with very simple things -- and scared. I tried to become the woman I needed to be in order to live.
Diet Eman
The longer you wait for the future, the shorter it will be.
Loesje
All forests are one... They are all echoes of the first forest that gave birth to Mystery when the world began.
Charles de Lint
Peter Wessel and Peter Van Daan have grown into one Peter, who is beloved and good, and for whom I long desperately.
Anne Frank
I'm sentimental--I know. I'm desperate and silly--I know that too. Oh, help me!
Anne Frank
Although claiming my true identity as a child of God, I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation. I still think about his love as conditional and about home as a place I am not yet fully sure of. While walking home, I keep entertaining doubts about whether I will be truly welcome when I get there. As I look at my spiritual journey, my long and fatiguing trip home, I see how full it is of guilt about the past and worries about the future. I realize my failures and know that I have lost the dignity of my sonship, but I am not yet able to fully believe that where my failings are great, 'grace is always greater.' Still clinging to my sense of worthlessness, I project for myself a place far below that which belongs to the son, (p. 52).
Henri J.M. Nouwen
If the Gospels were truly the pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning.
Corrie ten Boom
I could have forced myself to adapt," said Taads. "In this world the individual self is of such importance that it is allowed to become absorbed in itself and to grub around in its trivial personal history for years on end with the help of a psychiatrist, so as to be able to cope. But I don't think that is important enough. And then suicide is no longer a disgrace. If I had done it earlier, I would have done it in hatred, but that is no longer the case.""Hatred?""I used to hate the world. People, smells, dogs, feet, telephones, newspapers, voices — everything filled me with the greatest disgust. I have always been afraid I might murder somebody. Suicide is when you have been all around the world with your fear and your aggression and you end up by yourself again.""It remains aggression.""Not necessarily.""What are you waiting for then?""For the right moment. The time has not yet come." He said it amiably, as if he were talking to a child.
Cees Nooteboom
Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
One, who suicides, is itself a killer and itself a victim. To trigger that has its decision, and own willingness, no one else.
Ehsan Sehgal
It's better to have a gay life of it than to commit suicide.
Vincent van Gogh
I don't want to grow old thinking ''what if I had done...''. I avoid the ''should have's'' and take ACTION.
Rachel Smets
Learn the discipline of being surprised not by suffering but by joy. As we grow old, there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. But don't be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
In interviews with riders that I've read and in conversations that I've had with them, the same thing always comes up: the best part was the suffering. In Amsterdam I once trained with a Canadian rider who was living in Holland. A notorious creampuff: in the sterile art of track racing he was Canadian champion in at least six disciplines, but when it came to toughing it out on the road he didn't have the character.The sky turned black, the water in the ditch rippled, a heavy storm broke loose. The Canadian sat up straight, raised his arms to heaven and shouted: 'Rain! Soak me! Ooh, rain, soak me, make me wet!'How can that be: suffering is suffering, isn't it?In 1910, Milan—San Remo was won by a rider who spent half an hour in a mountain hut, hiding from a snowstorm. Man, did he suffer!In 1919, Brussels—Amiens was won by a rider who rode the last forty kilometers with a flat front tire. Talk about suffering! He arrived at 11.30 at night, with a ninety-minute lead on the only other two riders who finished the race. The day had been like night, trees had whipped back and forth, farmers were blown back into their barns, there were hailstones, bomb craters from the war, crossroads where the gendarmes had run away, and riders had to climb onto one another's shoulders to wipe clean the muddied road signs.Oh, to have been a rider then. Because after the finish all the suffering turns into memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature's payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. 'Good for you.' Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lay with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately. That's why there are riders.Suffering you need; literature is baloney.
Tim Krabbé
Positive disintegration is the sublimation of suffering
Martijn Budel
If one suffers from the pain and the hardship, its friends feel empathy and sadness too. Whereas, its opponents celebrate and enjoy that.
Ehsan Sehgal
Life is but a Weaving” (the Tapestry Poem)“My life is but a weavingBetween my God and me.I cannot choose the colorsHe weaveth steadily.Oft’ times He weaveth sorrow;And I in foolish prideForget He sees the upperAnd I the underside.Not ’til the loom is silentAnd the shuttles cease to flyWill God unroll the canvasAnd reveal the reason why.The dark threads are as needfulIn the weaver’s skillful handAs the threads of gold and silverIn the pattern He has plannedHe knows, He loves, He cares;Nothing this truth can dim.He gives the very best to thoseWho leave the choice to Him.
Corrie ten Boom
Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
What I am in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
Vincent van Gogh
The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.
Corrie ten Boom
I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime.
Vincent van Gogh