Having An Epiphany Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

Shh," I interrupted him. "Hold on a second. I think I'm having an epiphany here. — Stephenie Meyer

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

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

One of the secrets to life, Epiphany, is to find your gifts and focus on those. Leave your liabilities in the dust of the road not taken. The world is an imperfect place. Everyone struggles. Successful people see trials as growth experiences, rather than stumbling blocks. You have everything you need for success. You're a beautiful young woman, and you're strong, and you have a clever mind. If you let anyone convince you otherwise, you steal from yourself. — Lisa Wingate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When things suck, time stands still, but when you have an epiphany and you're having the time of your life, it goes by in fast forward. — Brent Crawford

I will try to hold on to the intense feeling. I will both be glad that that's no longer happening and kind of miss it. When you're 14, you're basically on drugs all the time - the hormones in your body are so crazy. But I really loved and appreciated the intensity of that. And you're experiencing everything for the first time, so everything feels like an epiphany. And, like, I really liked the experience of having a crush, because I was like, this is my thing and it doesn't have to do with you and you're just some dummy boy for me to project on. — Tavi Gevinson

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

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 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

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