Zen Rabbit Quotes

A collection of literary quotes that are meaningful to me. Ideally, this would be all quotes but occasionally things slip through from my art blog, efoster4.tumblr.com

[zenrabbitquotes]

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has the right to weep.”

From Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

[zenrabbitquotes]

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul be rid of it.

Bartleby from The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville

[zenrabbitquotes]

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

From Pt III of Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot

[helloagauniverse]

“A light song comes from the leaves. A slow sigh says yes. And light sighs; A low voice, summer-sad.”

— Theodore Roethke, from section 5 of “Unfold! Unfold!” Words of the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke (Indiana University Press, 1964)

[zenrabbitquotes]

“So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

[zenrabbitquotes]

The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

William Carlos Williams

[dephus]

“how far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps? how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short? why do you find the unavailable so alluring? where did it begin? what went wrong? and who made you feel so worthless?”

— Warsan Shire, Questions for the Woman I was Last Night

[aspiritualwarrior]

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

[apoemaday]

The Shotgun Speaks

by Carrie Rudzinski

For the man who told me “I’m going to be a father soon. Thank God it’s going to be a boy. If it was a girl, I’d have to buy me a shotgun and shoot whoever she brought home.”

THE SHOTGUN SPEAKS

You, sir, are my favorite kind of my beast: the hunter who has become a cannibal. The one who knows it is so much easier to hunt what you have always been, that flesh is just flesh as long as it runs. Tell me, what does your daughter smell like? Does she love as hard as she bites? Do the catcalls now stick in your throat? Do you dream of the women who’ve swallowed you whole? What do you fear the most: the mirrors of men she will bring home or the constant reminder of the daughters you’ve stalked? Are you still excited by the dark? The burst, the carcass, purpled thighs: My darling, where have your hands been? What weapons would you plant in a son?

[kafkasapartment]

The New Novel, 1877. Winslow Homer. Watercolor on paper

[transelucency]

[aseaofquotes]

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

[apoemaday]

I Sit and Look Out

by Walt Whitman I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame; I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done; I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate; I see the wife misused by her husband–I see the treacherous seducer of young women; I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid–I see these sights on the earth; I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny–I see martyrs and prisoners; I observe a famine at sea–I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest; I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like; All these–All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon, See, hear, and am silent.

[jacquesbonhomme-deactivated2023]

Taking the Edge Off - by Stephen Romer (from Set Thy Love In Order)

[sweethotjazz-blog]

“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever. ”

Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (via sweethotjazz)

[professorhambonie-blog]

“The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”

— Eugene O’neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (via professorhambonie-blog)

[biblioklept]

“Living in a Simulation” — Tom Clark