A Quote by Neil Gaiman

We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

Neil Gaiman

Quote Topics

Around Build Cope Day Dealing Function Grit How Immune Layers Like Loss Order Others Out Pain Pain And Loss Painful Particle Pearl Shell Smooth Talk Walk

Quote Author

Neil Gaiman
British - Author
Born: November 10, 1960

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

Neil Gaiman

It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

Stephen King

The world is your oyster. Yes, but in that oyster is the pearl; and to get to the pearl one has to first discard the shell and the flesh.

Ian Gardner

The most extraordinary thing about the oyster is this. Irritations set into his shell. He does not like them. But when he cannot get ride of them, he uses the irritation to do the loveliest thing an oyster ever has a chance to do. If there are irritations in our lives today, there is only one prescription: make a pearl. It may have to be a pearl of patience, but anyhow, make a pearl. And it takes faith and I love to do it.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

We girls aren't supposed to fall for the good boys.We are supposed to like a bit of grit in our oyster.That's how you get a pearl, after all.

James Lovegrove

If someone has gone through a lot of emotional pain, including the loss of loved ones, that person may try to build a shell around his or her feelings to protect him- or herself from the pain.

Ruth Westheimer

What strikes the oyster shell doesn't damage the pearl.

Rumi

...like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?

Robin McKinley

Can you rework your past, the grit that rubs in you, until it is shiny and smooth as a pearl?

Anna Funder

It was like that. Sometimes I'd go for a period—days or weeks—without feeling the full sweep of my loss, and then as unexpected as a thunderclap, the realization would rip the protective coating from my senses. Maybe that's the way it is with trick knees and aging griefs. Totally pain free one moment and absorbingly painful the next.

Bette Greene

My role in life is that of the grain of sand to the oyster-it irritates the oyster and out comes a pearl.

Ross Perot

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, 'How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?' The honest answer is, I don't know.

Angela Duckworth

Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, "I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress." And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, "Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without." At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, "Yes, you are well and whole; but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty."

Khalil Gibran

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

Jodi Picoult

People like to talk a lot about me, about how I have anxiety or social disorders. I'll admit to anxiety, but it has nothing to do with media or being in front of a camera or being around people. It has to do with dealing with the sparring that I'm going to have or the workouts that I'm going to have from day to day.