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A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

Stephen Levine

Top 10 Best Quotes

“[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)”

“Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake. And one of the most fruitful. (79)”

“Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)”

“[D]on’t cling to your self-righteous suffering, let it go. . . . Nothing is too good to be true, let yourself be forgiven. To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well. (90)”

“If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay. (48)”

“[T]hose who insist they've got their 'shit together' are usually standing in it at the time. (16)”

“We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive. (43)”

“You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity. (24)”

“Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence. (29)”

“How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)”

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Book Keywords:

detachment, attachment, aversion, joy, death, resistance, tension, motivation, mercy, freedom, dismay, desire, suffering, present-moment, mental-health, healing, pain, physical-health, acceptance, living, nonattachment, fear, self-love, life, awareness, memory, letting-be, letting-go, grief, mindfulness, forgiveness, judgment, truth, confidence, rebirth, self-righteousness, reincarnation, now, presence, opportunity, healing-the-past, dying

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