Quotations

"Why would we have to know everything all the time? Why do we have to be so knowledgeable, so smart, so in control? We don’t! There’s no need to figure everything out. We can just be alive. We can breathe in and breathe out and let go and just trust our life, trust our body. Our body and our life know what to do. The problem is to let them do it, to relax and let them guide us."

— Norman Fischer, American Soto Zen roshi, born 1946

"The Bodhisattva body, the Buddha body, is the perfect eternal beautiful body hidden in the earthly body of impermanence and decay."

— Norman Fischer, American Soto Zen roshi, born 1946

"Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy."

— Norman Fischer, American Soto Zen roshi, born 1946

"I turn out all the lights and work in the dark."

— Sharon Fithian, American artist, born circa 1955

"The only thing better than singing is more singing."

— Ella Fitzgerald, American jazz vocalist, born 1917

"I stole everything I ever heard, but mostly I stole from the horns."

— Ella Fitzgerald, American jazz vocalist, born 1917

"Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, American author, born 1896

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, American author, born 1896

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, American author, born 1896

"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, American author, born 1896

"Tonight, we will both discover, how friends turn into lovers, when I make love to you."

— Roberta Flack, American singer, born 1937

"The unprepared mind cannot see the outstretched hand of opportunity."

— Alexander Fleming, Scottish pharmacologist, born 1881

"Nature makes penicillin; I just found it."

— Alexander Fleming, Scottish pharmacologist, born 1881

"One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did."

— Alexander Fleming, Scottish pharmacologist, born 1881