Quotes

• The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we’re left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up. — Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

• You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms… — Anna Akhmatova

• I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. – Andrew Wyeth

• I think survival is at stake for all of us all the time. Every poem, every work of art, everything that is well done, well made, well said, generously given, adds to our chances of survival. – Philip Booth

• It did not occur to Arthur that he should try to relieve her guilt or offer to share the blame. Nor did it occur to Eleanor that she had just repeated the mistake of all women since the beginning of time. She had not only forgiven a man his ways, but had taken responsibility for them as well. She closed her eyes and said goodbye to her female god. – From the movie, The Proposition (1998)

• To reach out to you when I’m in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you. — Orson Scott-Card

• Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. –Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks

• The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.  – Charlotte Bronte

• We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love. — Tim Farrington

• Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. — Rumi

• Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

• In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems.-Rumi

• A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. — John Lennon

• Ah, life is a gate, a way, a path to Paradise anyway, why not live for fun and joy and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and LAUGH… — Jack Kerouac

• And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many. — J.R.R. Tolkien

• and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you — e. e. cummings

• If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life. — Oscar Wilde

• Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience – waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking. — Gary Paulsen

• I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence…Often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. — Louise Gluck

• Even when a river of tears courses through this body, the flame of love cannot be quenched. — Izumi Shikibu

• Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear. — Walt Whitman

• I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap. — Ani DiFranco

• Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome. — Marguerite Duras

• It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone. — Rainer Maria Rilke

• Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another. — Judith Butler

• Once again love drives me on, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done. — Sappho

• One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. — Jack Kerouac

• The night you gave me my birthday party… you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best. — Zelda Fitzgerald

• Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. — Henry Miller

• Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome. — Marguerite Duras

• They say there is a doorway from heart to heart, but what is the use of a door when there are no walls? — Rumi

• For without you, I swear, the town has become like a prison to me. Distraction and the mountain and the desert, all I desire. — Rumi

• Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. — Rumi

• If you can’t fix it, you have to stand it. — Annie Proulx

• I don’t teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubborness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel global doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don’t have any doubt. –Richard Bausch, from Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between

• Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. — Rainier Maria Rilke

• Hope is a waking dream. — Aristotle

• And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath

• The holiest of all holidays are those. Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

• People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents. — Andrew Carnegie

• Becky walked to the sea late in the day, trod barefoot among the tumbled blocks of stone that lined the foreshore, smelling the old harsh smell of salt, hearing the water slap and chuckle while from high above came the endless sinister trickling of the cliffs. Into her consciousness stole, maybe for the first time, the sense of loneliness; an oppression born of the gentle miles of summer water, the tall blackness of the headlands, the fingers of the stone ledges pushing out into the sea. — Keith Roberts (Pavane)

• Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike. — J.K. Rowling

• the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn who it touches. — e. e. cummings

• How did it happen that their lips came together?  How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill?  A kiss, and all was said.  — Victor Hugo

• Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words but to pour them all out, just as it is, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keeping what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away. –George Eliot

• Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.  ~Margaret Mitchell

• There is no remedy for love but to love more. — Henry David Thoreau

• Is not a kiss the very autograph of love? — Henry Finch

• The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.  — Katherine Mansfield

• No, I don’t think I will kiss you, although you need kissing, badly. That’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how. — Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind)

• This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… –Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

• May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air. –Franz Kafka

• The river of what might have been still runs and there will never come a time when we do not hear it. My life for forty years was a pair of rivers, the river that might have been beside the one that was. –Wayne Johnston

• Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass. — D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover)

• The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide. –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work. — Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

• I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone. — Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

• Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you. –Walt Whitman

• What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life. — Walt Whitman

• Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. –Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks

• Sky doesn’t age or remember, carries neither grudges nor hope. Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first. –Jane Hirshfield

• ” …as the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.”  -Rilke

• I believe in everything the heart can stand. –C.Haymes

• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. –Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

• There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees. –Victor Hugo

• If you’d attempt this, however: hand in hand to be mine, as the wine in the wineglass is wine. If you’d attempt this. — Rilke, November 1925

• Watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely, no part left out. -Izumi Shikubu

• A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days. -Goethe

• …the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense. –Rilke

• In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain–I find no sea room—but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore. –Thoreau

• Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope. –Edith Wharton

• I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big. –Rilke

• His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete. — F. Scott Fitzgerald,The Great Gatsby

• He that can have patience can have what he will. — Benjamin Franklin

• A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship. — Rainer Maria Rilke

• Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins. — Iris Murdoch

• It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. –Aldous Huxley

• A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself. That’s how I hold your voice. –Rumi

• Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath? –Rainer Marie Rilke, Comfort Me

• It is the stars as not yet known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows. –Thoreau

• Life isn’t one damn thing after another. It’s the same damn thing again and again. –Edna St. Vincent Millay

• For identities that are perhaps a bit lonely, a bit anxious at the thought of the world, this could be the place to hinge a life. –Allen Jones on Ingomar, Montana

• Look, we don’t love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. –Rilke

• Patience, n: A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. –Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil’s Dictionary

• I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream. –Vincent Van Gogh

• And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us. — Pablo Neruda

• There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a conscious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from monsters. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss people, will know us too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can’t name it. When that happens, you have met one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers…they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind. –from Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons

• But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. –Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

• “My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it’s the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards….Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?” –Rilke, writing to Magda von Hattingberg on February 8, 1914

• I am tomorrow or some future day what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day. –James Joyce

• We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well…How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. –Paul Bowles, American writer

• Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think. –Horace

• Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours. — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

• You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you. — Isadora Duncan

• I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines. — Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield)

Quotes