A Quote by Holly Black

Life is like licking Honey from a Thorn — © Holly Black
Life is like licking Honey from a Thorn
My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.
He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.
I've been eating honey since I was young. I've been putting it on everything. I put it on fried chicken, put it on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I put it on my cereal. What else do I put honey on? I put honey on my face. Man, honey is the essential item to life.
The bee, though it finds every rose has a thorn, comes back loaded with honey from his rambles; and why should not other tourists do the same?
There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles.
I don't have anything against the 'Honey Badger.' It's just that 'Honey Badger' happened at such a dark time in my life. If the little kids out there want to call me the 'Honey Badger,' they can do that.
LIFE is a mosaic of pleasure and pain - grief is an interval between two moments of joy. Peace is the interlude between two wars. You have no rose without a thorn; the diligent picker will avoid the pricks and gather the flower. There is no bee without the sting; cleverness consists in gathering the honey nevertheless.
But [Pooh] couldn't sleep. The more he tried to sleep the more he couldn't. He tried counting Sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep, and, as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. Because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh's honey, and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when the five hundred and eighty-seventh Heffalump was licking its jaws, and saying to itself, "Very good honey this, I don't know when I've tasted better," Pooh could bear it no longer.
Things are simply the way they are. They don't give us suffering. Like a thorn: Does a sharp thorn give us suffering? No. It's simply a thorn. It doesn't give suffering to anybody. If we step on it, we suffer immediately. Why do we suffer? Because we stepped on it. So the suffering comes from us.
I was a thorn rushing to be with a rose, vinegar blending with honey… Then I found some dirt to make an ointment that would honor my soul… Love says, “You are right, but don’t claim these changes. Remember, I am wind. You are an ember I ignite.
Nature shaped the claw to trap, and the tooth to kill, but the thorn...the thorn's only purpose is to hurt.
A thorn in the flesh is nothing compared to a thorn in the conscience.
A golden chain is as much a chain as an iron one. Shri Ramakrishna used to say that, to pick out one thorn which has stuck into the foot, another thorn is requisitioned, and when the thorn is taken out, both are thrown away. So the bad tendencies are to be counteracted by the good ones, but after that, the good tendencies have also to be conquered.
Knowing what you know, be serene also, like a mountain; and do not be distressed by misfortune. Knowledge without serenity is an unlit candle; together they are honey-comb; honey without wax is a noble thing; wax without honey is only fit for burning.
The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.
From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.
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