Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some trees flourish, others die. Some cattle grow strong, others are taken by wolves. Some men are born rich enough and dumb enough to enjoy their lives. Ain't nothing fair. You know that.
For truth is strong next to the Almighty. She needs no policies or stratagems or licensings to make her victorious. These are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power.
A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, And pavement stars,--as stars to thee appear Seen in the galaxy, that milky way Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest Powder'd with stars.
The life and vigor of poetry consists of the fact that it steps out of itself, tears out a section of religion, then withdraws into itself to assimilate it. The same is true of philosophy.
What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
Forgetting takes space./Forgotten matters displace/as much anything else as/anything else. We must/skirt unlabeled crates/as thought it made sense/and take them when we go/to other states.
My books are better thought about than read. They're insanely dull and unreadable.But they're wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf.
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty. The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.
Love is a magic ray emitted from the burning core of the soul and illuminating the surrounding earth. It enables us to perceive life as a beautiful dream between one awakening and another.
True love cannot be found where it truly does not exist, Nor can it be hidden where it truly does. Anonymous Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love.
Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
There are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue; They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.
The Internet is perfect for delivering large blocks of text to people throughout the world for free. That's a plus. The downside is the ADD, the Internet-addled Attention Deficit Disorder.
The dream on the pillow, That flits with the day, The leaf of the willow A breath wears away; The dust on the blossom, The spray on the sea; Ay,--ask thine own bosom-- Are emblems of thee.
The breeze and the dew make tranquil the clear dawn; Behind the curtain there is one who alone is up betimes. The orioles sing and the flowers smile - Whose then, after all, is the Spring?
A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it slams and slams without meaning to and without meaning.
There are two kinds of people; those who are always well and those who are always sick. Most of the evils of the world come from the first sort and most of the achievement from the second.
The individualist is an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men); the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial (Thank God I am one in a crowd).
Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.
We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding.
Forbear to spew out reason from your mind, but rather ponder everything with keen judgment; and if it seems true, own yourself vanquished, but, if it is false, gird up your loins to fight.
When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.
I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed.
There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
My grandmothers are full of memories, smelling of soap and onions and wet clay, with veins rolling roughly over quick hands, they have many clean words to say, my grandmothers were strong.
Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me
In adversity it is easy to despise life; he is truly brave who can endure a wretched life. [Lat., Rebus in angustis facile est contemnere vitam; Fortiter ille facit qui miser esse potest.]
In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.
If I could/bind myself to this moment, to the slow//snare of its scent/what would it matter if I became//just the flutter of page/in a text someone turns//to examine me/in the wrong color?
I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.
Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.
My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866.
We'll dive into the earth together. And if one day a wild flower finds water and springs up from that piece of earth, its stem will have two blooms for sure: one will be you, the other me.
When hypocrisy is a character trait, it also affects one's thinking, because it consists in the negation of all the aspects of reality that one finds disagreeable, irrational or repugnant.
It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts, That all sin is divided into two parts. One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important
Beneath the sun's rays our shadow is our comrade; When clouds obscure the sun our shadow flees. So Fortune's smiles the fickle crowd pursues, But swift is gone whenever she veils her face.
Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.
Though completely armed with knowledge and endowed with power, we are blind and impotent in a world we have equipped and organized-a world of which we now fear the inextricable complexity.
I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.
With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.
Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.
A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.