80 Things Fall Apart Quotes That Teach You About Life

Things Fall Apart Masculinity Quotes

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• "As soon as his father walked in that night, Nwoye knew that Ikemefuna had been killed, and something seemed to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow. He did not cry. He just hung limp."

• "Nwoye had heard that twins were put in earthenware pots and thrown away in the forest, but he had never yet come across them. A vague chill had descended on him, and his head had seemed to swell, like a solitary walker at night who passes an evil spirit on the way. Then something had given way inside him. It descended on him again, this feeling, when his father walked in that night after killing Ikemefuna."

• "It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The hymn words were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth."

• “You have not eaten for two days,” said [Okonkwo’s] daughter Ezinma when she brought the food to him. “So you must finish this.” She sat down and stretched her legs in front of her. Okonkwo ate the food absent-mindedly. “She should have been born a boy,” he thought as he looked at his ten-year-old daughter.

• "Ezinma did not call her mother Nne like all children. She called her by her name, Ekwefi, as her father and other grown-up people did. The relationship between them was not only that of mother and child. There was something in it like the companionship of equals, which was strengthened by such little conspiracies as eating eggs in the bedroom."

• "Everybody knew she was an ogbanje. These sudden bouts of sickness and health were typical of her kind. But she had lived so long that perhaps she had decided to stay. Some of them did become tired of their evil rounds of birth and death or took pity on their mothers and stayed. Ekwefi believed deep inside her that Ezinma had come to visit."

• "In the matter of religion, there was a growing feeling that there might be something in it, after all, something vaguely akin to the method in the overwhelming madness. The ever-increasing feeling was due to Mr. Brown, the white missionary, who was very firm in restraining his flock from provoking the wrath of the clan…Mr. Brown preached against such excess of zeal…so Mr. Brown came to be respected even by the family because he trod softly on its faith."

• “You say that there is one supreme God who made heaven and earth,” said Akunna on one of Mr. Brown’s visits. “We also believe in Him and call Him Chukwu. He made all the world and the other gods.”

• “There are no other gods,” said Mr. Brown. “Chukwu is the only God and all others are false.”

• "Mr. Brown learned a good deal about the clan’s religion, and he concluded that a frontal attack on it would not succeed. And so he built a school and a small hospital in Umuofia."

When Things Fall Apart Quotes

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More about things fall apart quotes.

• “The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times.

• “Everything is fresh, the essence of realization.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “We can use our personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.”― Pema Chödrön When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times.

• “Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Finally, never give up on yourself. Then you will never give up on others.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Maybe the most important teaching is to lighten up and relax. It’s such a huge help in working with our crazy mixed-up minds to remember that what we’re doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread. We’re letting it blur the sharp corners of self-criticism and complaint.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times.

• “Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

• “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don’t know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security.”― Pema Chödrön When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “This is how it actually works. There has to be some kind of respect for the jitters, some understanding of how our emotions have the power to run us around in circles. That understanding helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we increase our confusion, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because we have basic goodness, basic wisdom, basic intelligence, we can stop harming ourselves and harming others. Because of mindfulness, we see things when they arise. Because of our understanding, we don’t buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive. We leave things minute. They stay tiny. They don’t keep expanding into World War III or domestic violence. It all comes through learning to pause for a moment, learning not to just impulsively do the same thing again and again. It’s a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

• “Birth is painful and delightful. Death is painful and delightful. Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else. Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “We awaken this bodhichitta, this tenderness for life, when we can no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence. In the words of the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, “You take it all in. You let the pain of the world touch your heart, and you turn it into compassion.” It is said that in difficult times, it is only bodhichitta that heals.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times

• “It’s a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

• “The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. It is an issue that applies to everyone, including both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult.

• “We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that’s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Casteneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn’t matter at all.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Be curious. Welcome groundlessness. Lighten up and relax. Offer chaos a cup of tea.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away. We do the big escape: we act out, say something, slam a door, hit someone, or throw a pot as a way of not facing what’s happening in our hearts. Or we shove the feelings under and somehow deaden the pain. We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds. All over the world, people are so caught in running that they forget to take advantage of the beauty around them. We become so accustomed to speeding ahead that we rob ourselves of joy.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don’t struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

Quotes From Things Fall Apart

Find out more about things fall apart quotes below.

• “The ground of not causing harm is mindfulness, a sense of clear seeing with respect and compassion for what it is we see. This is what basic practice shows us. But mindfulness doesn’t stop with formal meditation. It helps us relate with all the details of our lives. It helps us see and hear and smell, without closing our eyes or our ears or our noses. It’s a lifetime’s journey to relate honestly to the immediacy of our experience and to respect ourselves enough not to judge it. As we become more wholehearted in this journey of gentle honesty, it comes as quite a shock to realize how much we’ve blinded ourselves to some of the ways in which we cause harm. Our style is so ingrained that we can’t hear when people try to tell us, either kindly or rudely, that maybe we’re causing some harm by the way we are or the way we relate with others. We’ve become so used to the way we do things that somehow we think that others are used to it too. It’s painful to face how we harm others, and it takes a while.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That’s what we’re going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “In Tibetan there’s an interesting word: ye tang che. The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means “exhausted.” Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say “totally fed up.” It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape? We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there’s something wrong with that.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “It all comes through learning to pause for a moment, remembering not just impulsively to do the same thing again and again. It’s a transformative experience to remain instead of immediately filling up the space simply. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.

• "The result is that we cease to cause harm. We begin to know ourselves thoroughly and to respect ourselves.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

• “We start by working with the monsters in our mind. Then we develop the wisdom and compassion to communicate sanely with the threats and fears of our daily life.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don’t even want to look at. Compassion isn’t some kind of self-improvement project or ideal that we’re trying to live up too.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “So, along with clear seeing, there’s another important element, and that’s kindness. It seems that, without clarity and honesty, we don’t progress. We just stay stuck in the same vicious cycle. But honesty without kindness makes us feel grim and mean, and pretty soon we start looking like we’ve been sucking on lemons. We become so caught up in introspection that we lose any contentment or gratitude we might have had. The sense of being irritated by ourselves and our lives and other people’s idiosyncrasies becomes overwhelming. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on kindness.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “I have a friend dying of AIDS. Before I was leaving for a trip, we were talking. He said, “I didn’t want this, and I hated this, and I was terrified of this. But it turns out that this illness has been my greatest gift.” He said, “Now every moment is so precious to me. All the people in my life are so precious to me. My whole life means so much to me.” Something had really changed, and he felt ready for his death. Something that was horrifying and scary had turned into a gift. Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Whether it’s ourselves, our lovers, bosses, children, local Scrooge, or the political situation, it’s more daring and real not to shut anyone out of our hearts and not to make the other into an enemy. If we begin to live like this, we’ll find that we actually can’t make things completely right or completely wrong anymore, because things are a lot more slippery and playful than that. Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “As one student said, “Lower your standards and relax as it is.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Usually we feel that there’s a large problem and we have to fix it. The instruction is to stop. Do something unfamiliar. Do anything besides rushing off in the same old direction, up to the same old tricks.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Each day, we’re given many opportunities to open up or shut down. The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to the place where we think we can’t handle whatever is happening. It’s too much. It’s gone too far. We feel bad about ourselves. There’s no way we can manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. No matter how hard we try, it just won’t work. Basically, life has just nailed us.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “Death in everyday life could also be defined as experiencing all the things that we don’t want. Our marriage isn’t working; our job isn’t coming together. Having a relationship with death in everyday life means that we begin to be able to wait, to relax with insecurity, with panic, with embarrassment, with things not working out.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “TURNING YOUR MIND toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

• “the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.”― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

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