Processing Quotes

“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”
― Don DeLillo

“There are certain memories I'd never write down or tell anyone. I know what happens when you write things down. They change shape. Some of the feeling goes away. Things on the page are never as rich as they are in your head, as they were in real life.”
― Hanna Halperin, I Could Live Here Forever

“The bottom line is no matter what happens to you, you got to keep going; and bitterness is quite cumbersome. Jokes is a way of shaking that off, processing something with the alchemy of levity.”
― Dave Chappelle

“The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?”
― Burkhard Bilger

“The process of acceptance is to train your mind to focus on what you have.”
― Kim Ha Campbell, Inner Peace Outer Abundance

“Also, when I write letters, I spend the next two days thinking about what I figured out in my letters.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The only thing man is capable of creating is an ‘experience’. Everything else is just processing, arrangement and rearrangement of pre-existing matter.”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“...[T]he only way a person had to process an experience so troubling was by sharing it.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, The Invention of Sound

“In that moment, I finally understood her. She had become so emotionally and physically paralyzed from her own abusive relationship...she didn’t know how to protect us. She couldn’t protect us.”
― R.J. Halbert, Caretaker

“when you are passionate about the world a stare writes your life.”
― Gwen Calvo

“I dont know but together.”
― Gwen Calvo

“Sometimes you just need to go through a door”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“solitude, each wave higher and higher against the wall. the crash, a flight.”
― Gwen Calvo

“Isolate it, reflect on it, recuperate.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“A substantial amount of our brain power is devoted to visual processing. When we add a visual component, a drawing component, to what we are teaching, student recall increases.”
― Susan A. Gingras Fitzell

“In most cases what we perceive as ‘perfection’ is rarely attainable. However, if you continuously strive for excellence, you will be pleasantly surprised by just how close you can get.”
― Craig J. Tomsky

“Sitting around talking together without vacuums and fans or guards harassing us really changed our lives. We had been friends and brothers for years--since the very beginning. We had forged deep bonds fighting and resisting the camp admin and interrogators. But we had still experienced the worst of Guantánamo alone, in our cages or in interrogations. In these casual conversations, where we sat around drinking coffee, we processed what we had been through, and that somehow made us feel like we hadn't been alone. We remembered together our experiences: First being brought to Guantánamo, the first time we saw an iguana or banana rat. The fights we had. The bad guards--those who'd broken my ankle, those who'd taken Omar's prosthetic leg--and the good, like the one who'd given Khalid a slice of bread when he was on food punishment. The worst interrogators and the kind nurses who treated us humanely. We remembered the brothers we lost: Yassir, Mana'a, Ali, Waddah, al-Amri, Hajji Nassim (Inayatullah), and Awal Gul. And our remembering together made our losses and those solitary experiences real and a part of all our memories. It validated them and reminded us that, even though we were in solitary confinement or isolation or thousands of miles from the ones we loved, we had never been completely alone. It reminded us how we had grown older together and how we had become our own kind of family. A family with cats.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Even though grief and loss are universal experiences, they are also uniquely individual.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“The way we talk about grief is dead wrong.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“I don’t think it’s possible to ever let go of something that is a part of you, which is what an "it" will always be.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“Releasing guilt and blame gives us back the bandwidth and energy to focus on things we actually can change, instead of expending energy on the things we can’t.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“Just because you’ve experienced a loss doesn’t mean you have to exist in grief for the rest of your life.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“Getting out of our heads and into our hearts is one of the quickest ways to positively impact our relationship with ourselves.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“We get so focused on getting things done that we tend to forget we are human beings, not human doings.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“Practice is not about being perfect; it’s about improving, learning, gaining a measure of confidence, stretching in new directions.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“Love is universal. Love allows you to accept and forgive not only others but also yourself. Love helps you grow. Love lets you see things in a different light. Love can conquer all.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“Yes, getting up is important, but how you get back up—ideally more confident, determined, resilient, stronger—is what truly makes the difference.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“If loss and grief are natural and to be expected, I should not be surprised, afraid, or worse, lose hope, when an "it" happens.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“Purpose is whatever is meaningful to you and it can change over time.”
― Julia A. Nicholson, Move Forward Stronger: A Dynamic Framework to Process Change, Loss, and Grief

“When people reflect on harsh events in their lives, it's important that they write or talk and not just think. Thinking doesn't provide the narrative closure that writing or talking does, and it often leads people to sink into ruminative loops that prolong their anguish.”
― Geoffrey L Cohen, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides - Library Edition