Calkins Quotes & Sayings

Our job is to ask questions of children so that children internalize these questions and ask them of themselves and their own emerging drafts. — Lucy Calkins

If you don't practice presence, you never learn how to have busyness facilitate accomplishment. — Darrell Calkins

If you sustain your balance and intention, everything, including things unimaginable, arrive at the appropriate time and place. — Darrell Calkins

Love has an enormous spectrum of expression and impact. At the far end, it begins to unravel and move away from subjective experience and personal preference. It becomes pure intent, something that no longer tickles our desires, but fulfills the deeper needs of each circumstance we're in. — Darrell Calkins

This is where we can find the greatest relief and joy everyday: falling under thought, anxiety, worry and all forms of me, into stillness; losing oneself in compelling engagements that transcend ambition, strategy, self-gain and self-consciousness. — Darrell Calkins

Now, what am I here for, again?' There's genuine humility, and courage, in that question. — Darrell Calkins

When a young writer deliberately tries to create an effect, the result is often a little self-conscious and overdone. But why is it so hard for us to glory in what the writer has tried to do, or even in the very fact that the writer has deliberately tried to do something? — Lucy Calkins

If you want to know what you really value, look at where and how you spend your time. — Darrell Calkins

Conscience exists as a reality-check for intent, but it's not intent itself. Anyone who really plays, explores and celebrates life has the right intent. — Darrell Calkins

Perhaps the best we can do is to work to uphold the human virtues and qualities we most value, even in the face of everyone's cynicism, skepticism and distrust, including our own. — Darrell Calkins

Our greatest joys and inspirations are usually found behind our fears. The trick is just to find fun in the force of Nature, wherever it manifests. — Darrell Calkins

You need to understand something, boy. The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you. If you are one of those people how only sees problems and darkness and despair, then that is all there is ever going to be for you. But if you are one of those people how sees hope, opportunity, and love, then you can make a difference — Lucy Calkins

It's always an excellent idea to take a good look around at nature. — Darrell Calkins

Strong drink has agitated the town since its founding. Almost its first organization was a temperance society. Its founders had three anathemas, irreligion, slavery and intemperance. They thought they had barred alcohol forever by incorporating in all deeds the proviso that if intoxicating drinks were made or sold on the premises, the land would revert to the college. The clause was never legally invoked, and is probably invalid. — Earnest Elmo Calkins

I think it's essential to construct our lives
as if it's a story we want to tell. — Darrell Calkins

A state of grace is when everything imperfect disappears, leaving just stripped-down harmony. One is left empty, with nothing except a fluid open sensation, similar to becoming the sound from a tuning fork piercing through space. — Darrell Calkins

Forgiveness is really about absolution: to set free. But if you look carefully at the dynamic, the one you're setting free is yourself. — Darrell Calkins

Adam frowned. "What possessed you to come to Newgate? 'Tis no place for a woman, especially one as young as you, and unaccompanied to boot! You're lucky you got out alive."
Lucy scowled back, "I think it is my right to visit my own brother! Anyway, 'tis no matter to you!" Resentfully, she recalled herself, "Sir. — Susanna Calkins

The rustle of the leaves in summer's hush When wandering breezes touch them, and the sigh That filters through the forest, or the gush That swells and sinks amid the branches high,
'Tis all the music of the wind, and we Let fancy float on the aeolian breath. — John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

God is its author, and not man; he laid
The key-note of all harmonies; he planned
All perfect combinations, and he made
Us so that we could hear and understand. — John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

The pace and number of imagined obligations is neither from earth (nature's demands) nor from heaven (Nature's callings). So, they are synthetic and separated from both. The longer and deeper one invests in this synthetic process, the more exhausted and anguished one's essential spirit becomes. — Darrell Calkins

One does not find freedom or enact responsibility by surrendering to another's conceptualization of these ideas. — Darrell Calkins

Writing well has everything to do with being able to read one's own work with an eye toward the unmet possibilities that are there. — Lucy Calkins

Meanings come not from events themselves, but from what we bring to them. — Lucy Calkins

Real giving, clean, humble, precise, requires at least some anonymity. You do your job, and you're not going to be paid for it. That's the point in a way; you were already paid for it...Greatness, if you want to shoot for that, is the ability to do this and not have resentment or any other dis-ease accumulate. — Darrell Calkins

One's soul is made up of the unity of conscience and what compels you. That is, at the core, there is already a devotional relationship between these two. We just need to realize that and give them both the freedom to do what they wish. — Darrell Calkins

Similarly, although we use prepositional phrases when we write, we apparently don't write more effectively when we can label our language in these ways. — Lucy Calkins

The divine is a mystery, so the impulse to really discover, like a child, has to be the core response to anything. — Darrell Calkins

Sustainable serenity, joy and fulfillment demand greater spiritual virtuosity, which is only found through deeper integration of conscience into the mix of one's core intent. — Darrell Calkins

Death has shaken out the sands of thy glass. — John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

Far beneath the tainted foamThat frets above our peaceful home,We dream in joy and wake in loveNor know the rage that yells above. — John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

Luck comes when you bend to the requirements of reality. — Darrell Calkins

A stone can be used for building a house, blocking a road, or killing someone. The same is true for any idea. — Darrell Calkins

The greatest tragedy in life is our inability to experience and express fascination for the people and events we love while in their presence. — Darrell Calkins

I saw two clouds at morning Tinged by the rising sun, And in the dawn they floated on And mingled into one. — John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

How many people are watching a movie right now, or reading a book or listening to a song or looking into their life or dreaming with this profound, conscious or not, yearning more than anything for some kind of relationship somewhere with someone or something that would cause them to stagger in intimate rawness in friendship and love? — Darrell Calkins

Teach the writer, not the writing. — Lucy Calkins

At the piping of all hands,When the judgment-signal's spread-When the islands and the landsAnd the seas give up their dead,And the South and North shall come;When the sinner is dismayed,And the just man is afraid,Then Heaven be thy aid,Poor Tom. — John Gardiner Calkins Brainard

The human soul is complex. So is Nature (or life, if you prefer). Creating a perfect interface between the two results in a balance that one can recognize in an individual as a state of grace. — Darrell Calkins

Progress and accomplishment with anything and everything depend on how much quality one brings to the show. What makes for quality, if one breaks it down, is spectrum and depth of virtue. — Darrell Calkins

If you ever get a single wish from a genie, wish that what you know you should do and what you really have fun doing become one and the same. Whatever grand vision you may have, for you, those you love, or all of humanity and beyond, it becomes attainable there. Indeed, when these two become one, you yourself become the genie. — Darrell Calkins

We already know way too much, but don't know what to do with it. Beneath all that is a soul searching for how to have fun, in the deepest sense of the word, and how to cause fun for others. — Darrell Calkins

An initial perception or impulse has an infinite number of directions it can go. — Darrell Calkins

The only resolution is to spontaneously invent an unknown, unique set of qualities and actions so as to blend perfectly with the actual requirements you're confronted with. — Darrell Calkins

Knowledge burnished through suffering becomes wisdom, which eventually opens into the calling to return in innocence to simple harmony. — Darrell Calkins

Write about just one thing, I have said, and there is wisdom in this advice ... And yet, there is wisdom also in William Sloanes contrary observation: Almost all effective writing above the level of the soup can turns out to be about quite a lot of things fused or laced or linked together. — Lucy Calkins

It is, to tell the truth, just such a Main Street as Sinclair Lewis describes with such delightful malevolence, but like that Main Street and all Main Streets, behind its commonplace facade life is as varied and colorful as any spot where human beings are gathered, however dull their outward shell may appear to the superficial observer. — Earnest Elmo Calkins

Hate no one; hate their vices, not themselves. — John Gardiner Calkins Brainard