words worth your while

daily quotes from literature, poetry, and other writings

[wordwhile]

—turning from the tremendous lie of sleep i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

— E.E. Cummings, "Sonnets—Unrealities" X

[wordwhile]

Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans where an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little bit of Eternity dropped in your hands . . . .

— Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

[wordwhile]

windows go orange in the slowly.

— E.E. Cummings, "Post Impressions"

[wordwhile]

Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.

— S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

[wordwhile]

Lady of my unkempt adoration

— E.E. Cummings, "Amores"

[wordwhile]

your drowsy lips where float flowers of kiss

— E.E. Cummings, "Amores"

[wordwhile]

The night was an unwritten poem — the gleam and drip of light like the play of an incoherent mind, fluttering, slipping in and out of reality; never at rest; never the firm silver of true metal; burnished and gone like a dream.

— John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga Volume Three

[wordwhile]

I’m not going to marry anyone till it hurts not to.

— John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga Volume Three

[wordwhile]

. . . your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

[wordwhile]

And a change in the weather is enough to create the world and ourselves afresh.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

[wordwhile]

We make a point of telling ourselves that death can come at any moment, but when we do so we think of that moment as something vague and distant, not as something that can have anything to do with the day that has already begun or might meant that death — or the first signs of its partial possessions of us, after which it will never loosen its hold again — will occur this very afternoon, the almost inevitable afternoon, with its hourly activities prescribed in advance.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

[wordwhile]

. . . in the liquid, icy air that bathed the chestnuts and planes on the boulevards and the tree in the courtyard of our house, the narcissi, the daffodils, the anemones of the Ponte Vecchio were already beginning to open as in a bowl of clear water.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

[wordwhile]

For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint — forgotten, mysterious, and fresh — of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory.

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. by Mark Treharne

[wordwhile]

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

[wordwhile]

The whiteness of the page before it is written on and after it is erased is and is not the same white, and the silence before a word is spoken and after is and is not the same silence.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

[wordwhile]

Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die.

— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

[wordwhile]

Then suddenly a chance, the passing of something — I knew not what — and then a stillness that could be felt. Nothing but this gaunt quiet.

— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds