what are some of your favourite quotes at the moment? ❤️
“A heart’s a heavy burden”
— Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle
“This is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this
which hurts
just enough to be a scar.
And heals just enough to be a nation.”
— Eavan Boland, “A Habitable Grief”
“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”
— Muriel Rukeyser, “Waterlily Fire: IV”
“Yet is grief the right word? Her grief has become her own determination. Nothing will stop her.”
— John Berger, The Red Tenda of Bologna
“Do you remember a night when I came along the dark passage to your room in a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were afraid of death or not? That is the sort of occasion on which the things I want to say to you,–and to you only,–get said.”
— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West
“Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give
The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.”
— Philip Larkin, “Bridge for the Living”
“Thoreau always had two notebooks—one for facts, and the other for poetry. But he had a hard time keeping them apart, as he often found facts more poetic than his poems. They are, he said, translated from the language of the earth into that of the sky. Thoreau knew that the imagination uses facts to fabricate images and even delicate architectures. One summer night, looking up into the sky at a particularly beautiful, scintillating star, he thought perhaps another traveler somewhere else along the coast was, like him, looking up at that same star and said, ‘Of what unsuspected triangles are stars the apex?’”
— Jean Frémon, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Gloves”
“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.
“Life, as I see it, is all about farewells rather than reunions. That is why we have songs and photographs. It is parting that makes up our lives.”
— Geoff Dyer, “Parting Shots”
“I know you, and stare at you in silence.”
— Arthur Rimbaud, “Flowerbeds of Amaranths”
“To spend the whole night with someone is agapē: it is ethical. For you must move with him and with yourself from the arms of the one twin to the abyss of the other. This shared journey, unsure yet close, honest embracing dishonesty, changes the relationship. It may not be a marriage, but it will be sacramental even without the benefit of sacraments. To navigate this together is to achieve the mundane: to be present to each other, both at the point of difficult ecstasy and at the point of abyssal infinity, brings you into the shared cares of the finite world.”
— Gillian Rose, Love’s Work
“What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness.”
— Richard Siken, “Portrait of Frederyk in Shifting Light”
“Think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the heat between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence.”
— Chelsea Hodson, “A Simple Woman”
“And some day, in eighty years, when you’re a hundred and I’m a hundred and thirty-four, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: it has been so wonderful.”
— George Saunders, speech at Syracuse University (2013)
“They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.”
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel
“The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he’s come from,
where he’s headed.
That way, he’ll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then your’ll be
such good friends
you don’t care.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Red Brocade”
“And no one can ever figure out what you want,/ and you won’t tell them, / and you realize the one person in this world who loves you / isn’t the one you thought it would be, / and you don’t trust him to love you in a way / you would enjoy.”
— Richard Siken, “A Primer for the Small Weird Loves”
“The way you sang to me that first time like
Heaven is real and you only had two minutes to prove it to me.”
— Kelly Morell, “Last Night I Told You About the Moon”
“I kept fiddling with my phone through dinner
because I was fascinated
that every time I tried to type love,
I missed the o and hit i instead.
I live you is a mistake I make so often,
I wonder if it’s not
what I’ve been really meaning to say.”
— Jamaal May, “Macrophobia: Fear of Waiting”
“You are the moon in my palm,
the dusk and the dawn;
anytime I have felt a substantial magic
in this frail human life.”
— L.E. Groves, “Untitled”
“I have a memory which I want to share with you. It’s about a secret practice of women, men, old people, children. We become aware of this practice obliquely, it’s not something we’re looking for, and very quickly we take it for granted.
Watch trees and see how they move in the wind. Watch animals and notice how cautiously yet independently they go their separate ways—running, burrowing, ambling, flying. The same for fishes and their way of swimming […] Now consider human lives, their every-minute, every-day lives! Their lives depend upon an agreed regularity to which each contributes. Maintaining this regularity is the forgotten practice I’m talking about.
It explains the arrival of the fruit in the market each day, the lights on the street at night, the letters slipped under the front door, the matches in a match box all pointing in the same direction, music heard on the radio, smiles exchanged between strangers. The regularity has a beat, very distant, often inaudible, and at the same time similar to a heartbeat.
No place for illusions here. The beat doesn’t stop solitude, it doesn’t cure pain, you can’t telephone it—it’s simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story.”
— John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters
