Mary Szybist Quotes

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.

Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

We will never be authentically angry or authentically fair while we are trying to be both at once.

I had to choose, I'd be so sad. They are flip sides of the same coin. I love both comedy and drama.

Life itself is controversy.

I have fervently been on both sides of that question at different times.

I feel like humans, when you're faced with decisions, you can go up and down: duality.

The body is our enemy, and yet is our friend.

I live in a world where two truths coexist: where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand

Two hands. One to destroy, the other to save. Which had he lost?

They don't have to choose either/or. They can have their cake and mutilate it too.

Neither way is better. / Both ways are necessary. / It is also necessary / To make a choice between them.

Tao is the source of both fullness and emptiness. But it is itself neither fullness nor emptiness.

The tension of opposites: Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.

There was much to hate in this world and too much to love.

On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.

There can be no peace for us, only misery, and the greatest happiness.

No one is so good that he has no bad in him, & no one is so bad that he has no good in him

Half of humanity has been accepting the inner world but denying the outer world.

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

The world is full of contradiction.