Quotes & Sayings About Epiphany

I can't relate to the idea of suicide. I guess I'm just one of those people that is always optimistic and upbeat. But one day, I sat down. I said 'You know what? Just to kind of purge myself, I want to see what its like to feel that low'. So I decided to write a suicide note. Yeah, just to kinda flush it out there and put it on a page. And I started to do this, and I had an epiphany. I'll share this with you: a suicide note that is written by somebody that is not suicidal is called an autobiography. I am on Chapter 58. — Dane Cook

My first epiphany that this might work came on my first day, when I went into biofeedback. They hooked me up to computers through electrodes, put me in a comfortable lounge chair, put an eye pillow over my face, slipped speakers onto my head and played an audio guided visualization. — Brad Willis

One day you wake up and you realize something, you see something in a way that you never saw it before, and boom, epiphany. Something is different forever. — John Green

Coincidence is just the hand of God who pushes you on the right track. That path will lead your steps towards an epiphany that will change your life. Don't believe in coincidences, believe in the righteousness of everything that happens to you. — Irina Serban

No words for the passion. No words for the need.No words for the sheer epiphany of the moment.And so, on an otherwise unremarkable Friday afternoon, in the heart of Mayfair, in a quiet drawing room on Mount Street, Colin Bridgerton kissed Penelope Featherington.And it was glorious. — Julia Quinn

I have no idea what to do with myself. And while I wait for my epiphany, I feel the toxins collecting in my body. — Inio Asano

In the moment, an epiphany feels like hell. — Anonymous

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock. — William H Gass

The thing about changing the world ... Once you do it, the world's all different. — Joss Whedon

It was an epiphany when I realized you don't have to call yourself a linguist, a translator, a poet. You can call yourself an artist and you can do all these things. — Jan Peacock

It's a wonderful epiphany: with a lie I can change reality; with a lie I can change the world. — Brady Udall

It's the hard things that break; soft things don't break. It was an epiphany I had today and I just wonder why it took me so very, very long to see it! You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it's the soft things that can't break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces! — C. JoyBell C.

The nature of the epistolary genre was revealed to me: a form of writing devoted to another person. Novels, poems, and so on, were texts into which others were free to enter, or not. Letters, on the other hand, did not exist without the other person, and their very mission, their significance, was the epiphany of the recipient. — Amelie Nothomb

Because of what I experienced when I was a kid, I want kids to have that kind of an epiphany moment, that little jolt, that little spark that they see when Dusty ['Planes'] flies higher than he has before. That scene where he flies straight up, and he's starting to get dizzy, and then finally it comes together. We forget as adults. We get jaded and we think that's kids' stuff, but for a kid who doesn't know about anything technical or how a movie is made, they're just going to see this and hear this beautiful score and see this dynamic, fantastical thing happening in front of them. — Dane Cook

It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh. — David Foster Wallace

I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me. — Ted Allen

Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down the corridor in the wrong direction. — Edward St. Aubyn

Sean looks up at her, and he wants to explain it all to her. Explain what it's like to be rubbed so raw, to have your emotional threshold exceeded day after day, your psyche beaten so completely that you have no choice but to turn inward, shunning any and everything that's ever brought you comfort. He wants to explain that - up until the past month or so - he'd been existing in a black hole, a mental abyss that he only recently realized he put himself in.
But watching Lauren's face - the concern in her expression, so pure and complete, considering he's technically still a complete stranger - he realizes he doesn't have to explain anything. She knows what it's like. Everybody does. — Patrick Anderson Jr.

I've always said that a taxi is a terrible place to have an epiphany ... — Gary Reilly

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance. — Geoffrey O'Brien

My epiphany: Printed words were the shadows of referents. Things: rock, sand, onion. Ideas: carpool, justice, maximization, irrevocability. Paragraphs were composite shadows of the scenarios and subjects they captured: the overwhelming richness and messiness of the world distilled to bare, chiaroscuroed necessity. — Tim Horvath

An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of creation. — Abraham Isaac Kook

Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness. — Philip Zaleski

The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience. — Pamela Stephenson

My epiphany came in that police cell: I realised I was about to lose everything and it didn't bother me, not in the slightest. I'd come to hate cycling because I blamed it for the lie I was living. — David Millar

Most of the words we use in history and everyday speech are like mental depth charges. As they descend [through our consciousness] and detonate, their resonant power is unleashed, showering our understanding with fragments of accumulated meaning and association. — James Axtell

And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine. — Kenneth Goldsmith

What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms? — John Boyne

Having thyroid cancer in 2009 really didn't change my life at all. I wish I could say that I had this epiphany. But I knew I was lucky before that, so it's not like I suddenly realised how lucky I am. — Clare Balding

Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany. — Huston Smith

I had this epiphany that I like the interaction with people. I wanted to make things happen at a grassroots level. — Diane Paulus

Looking into the spirit of others is sometimes like looking into a pond. Though we aim to see what's deep in the bottom, we are often distracted by our own reflection. — Katina Ferguson

Whose little boy are you? — James Baldwin

An author's dream does not necessarily come instantly. Rather, it is cultivated and nurtured, every epiphany and idea are like rain drops that bring life to the story being written. — M.J. Stoddard

Time dims memory. But not that kind. Somewhere in a corner of the brain, one little cell never forgets. It keeps the song that, heard again, recreates the room, the person, the moment. It preserves the phrase or the laugh or the gesture that resurrects a friend long gone. It knows precisely where you were and what you were doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor if you're old enough, or Kennedy's assassination, or Martin Luther King's, or the Challenger explosion. Every detail is frozen in memory, despite all the years. It keeps the innocuous question, too. The question that sometime later, when all the synapses are working, produces the epiphany, the moment when you're driving along and you realize that finally you understand. And why did it take you so long? — Kay Mills

Alright! You sir, you sir, how about a shave?
Come and visit your good friend Sweeney.
You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave.
I will have vengenance.
I will have salvation.
Who sir, you sir?
No ones in the chair, Come on! Come on!
Sweeney's. waiting. I want you bleeders.
You sir! Anybody!
Gentlemen now don't be shy!
Not one man, no, nor ten men.
Nor a hundred can assuage me.
I will have you!
And I will get him back even as he gloats
In the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats.
And my Lucy lies in ashes
And I'll never see my girl again.
But the work waits!
I'm alive at last!
And I'm full of joy! — Stephen Sondheim

I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter - something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket - to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously. This was better than religion, or this was what people meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked! People said Believe In God or Do Well At School or Buy This or Vote For Me or whatever, but nothing ever worked the way substances worked, nothing ever fucking delivered the way they did. They were truth. Everything else was falsehood. — Iain Banks

Has a world composed of "us" and "not us" been invaded at last? — Bisco Hatori

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise. — Nelson Mandela

I think 'Sightseers' was a bit of an epiphany, a massive learning curve, and it gave me loads of confidence to go out there, and also to create a female character which is completely unexpected and defies convention. — Alice Lowe

Myths are experienced in ordinary life, as everyday epiphanies. — Phil Cousineau

Who am I really? What has become of this bag of bones that had such great intentions in life, only to dwindle away like autumn's cold shoulder to the trees? I wish I could use this to help, in such pain to find hope, but I'd be the liar in this if I claimed a personal epiphany that relayed the secrets to derail this carousel. — Ian Schware

I had a conversation with somebody. It was an epiphany." His voice was rueful. He rocked her. "From that point on I swore I would never eat something that could talk. — Thea Harrison

I think a lot of people have unreasonable expectations because they never stop to consider what life actually has to offer them. They're always looking for some great epiphany from the skies. They never stop to consider the fact which human beings find hardest to recognize: Maybe I'm not worthy of an epiphany. — Robertson Davies

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror. — Glen Duncan

A friend of mine who was a founding father of the Church of Satan, who later I compared notes with, said when he was a kid, he too managed to get into Sallys Nude Ranch, and in the corral he saw his Sunday school teacher!!! That was a real epiphany for him. From that moment on he was a Satanist. — Anton Szandor LaVey

I always liked those moments of epiphany, when you have the next destination. — Brad Pitt

And of course, the answer came to me in the same way Jesus comes to those who drink in trailers: as an epiphany. — Augusten Burroughs

I'm suspicious of epiphanies, because they so rarely last. — Tom Barbash

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them ... I destroy them. — Orson Scott Card

The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I also decided I want to have a meaningful relationship. But only with one person. And then stay with that person for a long time. Like, uh, monography."
Stephen types a few keys in a quick rhythm. "It's shame your epiphany wasn't accompanied by a thesaurus. — Valerie Z. Lewis

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. — Khaled Hosseini

When I accepted the commission, I had something of an epiphany in the research I did about the agency, actually the science of espionage. I realized there is a connection between the sciences and the invisible forces of man. — James Sanborn

A dutiful soldier, I retreated to the ditches as ordered and hunkered down there. In those ditches, I had an epiphany. People treat you as badly as you let them treat you. — Karen Marie Moning

An epiphany is a visceral understanding of something you already know. — Jen Sincero

The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death. — Laura Rose Wagner

We wouldn't even be where we are had it not been that 70% of Hispanics voted for President Obama, voted Democratic in the last election. That caused an epiphany in the Senate, that's for sure. So all of a sudden we have already passed comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. That's a big victory. — Barack Obama

Well, a sort of epiphany: I was in a great band. And it's very cool to be at 53 and realise that when you were a kid you were in a great band. — Bob Geldof

I played music practically my entire life. But the first time I ever really played music was with John and Robby and Jim That's where it happened. it was an epiphany, a moment of profound clarity — Ray Manzarek

mid-descent testing out some unassisted flight epiphany that came to him as he slept. — Allan J. Ashinoff

Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany. — Christian Wiman

And here I'm struck by an epiphany so monstrous in its scale, so blinding in its effect that I feel my skin has turned inside out under the sun, that my innards possess magnetic qualities able to call vast fortunes together. And it's this: anything can happen if I want it to. — D.B.C. Pierre

I don't have a story about an epiphany in which I suddenly realised I wanted to be an actor. It was much more a case of the idea dawning on me gradually. — Elizabeth Debicki

Sometimes you go so far in your life,
you can't get back
though you know it's not really your life. — Michael Hogan

I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960. — Andre Brink

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care (saving them for later use, that is), seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. — James Joyce

The great epiphany of man is the recognition of the transience of now. — Beverley Sylvester

These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere ... and, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren't clearing and aren't going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me. There's the primal recognition, my soul saying, yes, I remember. — Paul Bogard

Slowly I discovered that writing was my way of coping with chaos and my cry of freedom, my homage to beauty. Because stories have the power to denounce, to teach, to inspire, sometimes to heal. That was a kind of epiphany and so I decided that being a writer would be my way to keep on keeping on and that words would be my bullets, my answers to the Weapons of Mass Deception. From that day on my conscience was at ease and growing old more endurable. And I knew I could 'look up and see the sky'. — Vittorio Vandelli

Teaching involves a search for meaning in the world. Teaching is a life project, a calling, a vocation that is an organizing center of all other activities. Teaching is past and future as well as present, it is background as well as foreground, it is depth as well as surface. Teaching is pain and humor, joy and anger, dreariness and epiphany. Teaching is world building, it is architecture and design, it is purpose and moral enterprise. Teaching is a way of being in the world that breaks through the boundaries of the traditional job and in the process redefines all life and teaching itself. (p. 130) — Nancy Fichtman Dana

You know when you're walking to the trash can at the zoo and you're holding something important in one hand, and you have something you have to throw away in the other hand, and you're sort of distracted because you just realized the universal truth that everything in the world either is or isn't pandas and you're trying to decide if that's an important epiphany or not and it's so distracting that it's not until you're halfway back to the lemur house that you realize you're still holding the garbage in your hand and that you seem to have thrown your car keys in the trash? — Jenny Lawson

I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top. — Tim Cahill

My whole life has been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God's presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that let's you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first compost heap. — Bette Midler

I was as real to him as he was to me and it struck me just then that I meant something to him. In whatever capacity he was able, I meant something. The irony of that epiphany made my gut twist. — C.J. Roberts

Every decade or so, Hollywood has an epiphany. It turns out faith-based audiences enjoy going to the movies, too. — David Harsanyi

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as his cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day. And as even his birth is his death, so every action and passage that manifests Christ to us is his birth, for Epiphany is manifestation. — John Donne

I think the biggest shift has been in realizing how much more we are creating our life than we realize. That was sort of the epiphany to me. — Lauren Bowles

Nearly every major innovation of the 20th century took place without claims of epiphany. — Scott Berkun

Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. — Justine Musk

To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced. — Emmanuel Levinas

when you reach a point where you can distinguish between the things you thought you wanted and the things you actually need, that is an epiphany. — Paul Stanley

Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o'clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayons. I was still beating myself up when the round robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face.
The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my life surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me?
"I'm sorry," I finally said. "I was just reminded of something very painful." And I guess that wasn't a lie. — Sarah Hepola

much-anticipated, long-awaited epiphany is actually a brief, quiet, simple shift in perspective from the one who is looking for That, to the recognition that it is That which is looking. — Robert Wolfe

Well, Rhoda was, I think, the last actress that we saw. There had been so many wonderful actresses who were close, really close. But there was no magical epiphany. — Mary Tyler Moore

For the first time in his life he understood why the Bible called sex "knowing". Everything was different. Now he knew Dante. He'd known Dante. And wonder of wonders, Dante had known him right back. — Damon Suede

The music began, and it was one of those life-changing moments. I saw an artist, Janis Joplin. She was exhilarating. She was vibrating. And she was like no other artist that I had ever seen before ... It struck me that hard. Maybe the word is epiphany, when you get that special sensation. — Clive Davis

During those days of whirling about the globe, I had an epiphany: travel was the only area of my life where I had no expectations. I anticipated nothing while fully engaging each moment. What bred adventure, surprise and deep experience was not knowing, surrendering to now and letting go of control. — Gina Greenlee

You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Noon bells sang out with their usual ignorance of mood, marking out moments of grief and worry, elation and confusion. The bells said that at its core, human life was fundamentally a sort of organic clockwork, while the winds and skylarks that swept against the sound of metronomic iron timekeeping argued for variety, subtlety, epiphany. — Gregory Maguire

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had. — Alice Sebold

Humility is not self deprecating, rather it is the quiet internal confidence allowing you to accept things as they are, especially yourself; that epiphany opens the way to personal greatness. — Casar Jacobson

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it. — Margaret George

If Flynn hadn't known his older brother for the addicted, lying sack of shit he was, he might have believed the pain he saw in that gaze, might have trusted that Connor had finally seen the error of his ways and was going to change his life and step out of their father's shadow. But Connor usually only had an epiphany if it got him laid, increased his bank balance, or severely pissed off Rupert. — M.A. Grant

I don't really know how dating works," Jared told her. "High school for me was mostly musical numbers. That's how it is in the States, you've seen the movies. Every time someone had an emotional dilemma or epiphany, they would burst into song, and we would all have to break out into perfectly choreographed dance sequences. It took a lot of intensive training. So many jazz squares, no time for love. — Sarah Rees Brennan

So if there was a way that I knew something about my character's desires or the things that they were resisting because I was saving it for some grand epiphany moment for my readers, I just feel like that's when you can feel the machine at work in a story. That's when you can feel the writer pulling the strings of the puppet. — Molly Antopol

One night I was on my [Navy] ship ... on my first cruise crossing the North Atlantic in a horrible storm, chained to the rails so I wouldn't fall overboard. In this lightning and thunder and hail, in this misery, I shouted at the heavens with my little squeaky voice and said, Someday I'm going to be a photographer! It was as big an epiphany as any man ever had. — Ralph Gibson

Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being
whoever he or she may be
is no longer revered as an inviolable mystery. — Karen Armstrong