Favorite passages, quotes, poems

[RainyCoast]

“You do not have to want to stop

your current behavior in order to

change, you simply have to want

something else more.”

 

Aldo Pucci

[RainyCoast]

“All a client has to do to thwart

your efforts is nothing.”

 

Adapted from King, 1992

[LaHermes]

"I do think that with any kind of infidelity, on some level - unless you're dealing with a sociopath - there's always a reason". Jessica Capshaw

 

"In my experience, I think there's must ado about fidelity and infidelity. I think sometimes true emotional relationships can go beyond those". Karan Johar

 

"Infidelity has always existed, but I feel like it was brushed under the carpet, behind the scenes. Now everyone is at it - and they've stopped pretending they're not." Karan Johar

[RainyCoast]

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

 

― Søren Kierkegaard

[RainyCoast]

Of the beyond I have no thought,

When you reduce this world to nought,

The other one may have its turn.

My joys come from this earth, and there,

That sun has burnt on my despair:

Once I have left those, I don’t care:

What happens is of no concern.

I do not even wish to hear

Whether beyond they hate or love,

And whether in that other sphere

One realm’s below and one above.

— Faust

[RainyCoast]

LA MIGRA

 

 

The grownups sat on their long chair called couch

And talked of the weather, the dew of the blossoms’ morning,

And what might happen to us, the children.

Mom said don’t leave the house, not without

Papers. Do I dare speak of the papers hoarded

In corners? How many more poems can you write

About a face spackled with fear before

It holds you? The reader aiming, too.

Let us find a charcoaled corner, you and I,

Where we will lay these words. Leave children

To sleep in windowless rooms. The mother

Biting a prayer. The country weaving a tomb.

 

 

—José Antonio Rodríguez

[LaHermes]

“No one can hate you more than someone who used to love you.”

― Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus

 

"The end of love looks like the beginning of war”

― Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom

 

"She knew with painful certainty that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference.”

― Susan Wiggs, Summer by the Sea

[LaHermes]

The great gift of life is the ability to appreciate what is there because we have ceased to demand what is not. Miriam Pollard, Acceptance, passage into hope.

[RainyCoast]

The startled salamander freezes

And feigns death.

This is the first step of consciousness among the stones,

The purest myth,

A great fire passed through, which is spirit.

 

The salamander was halfway up

The wall, in the light from our windows.

Its gaze was merely stone,

But I saw its heart beat eternal.

 

O my accomplice and my thought, allegory

Of all that is pure,

How I love what draws up thus in silence

The only force of joy.

 

How I love what is in harmony with the stars through

The inert mass of its whole body,

How I love what awaits the hour of its victory

And holds its breath and clings to the ground.

 

 

Yves Bonnefoy

[LaHermes]

Acceptance is a pause, a period of allowing, of letting be, of clear seeing. Acceptance takes us off the hair trigger, so that we’re less likely to make a knee-jerk reaction. Mark Williams and Danny Penman, Mindfulness, Finding Peace in a Frantic World.

[RainyCoast]

...

As soon as the shovel of time

Threw me onto the potter's wheel-

Myself without kith or kin-

I grew beneath the hand, a miracle.

 

Something stretched out my long neck

And hollowed round my soul

And marked on my back

Legends of flowers and leaves.

 

I stoked the birch in the fire

As Daniel commanded

And blessed my red temper

Until i spoke as a prophet.

 

I had long been the earth-

Arid, ochre, forlorn since birth-

But you fell on my chest by chance

From beaks of birds, from eyes of grass.

 

Arseny Tarkovsky

[RainyCoast]

“I was heading for the city in the south, of which they used to say in our village:

‘There are people for you! Just think—they never go to sleep!’

‘And why don’t they?’

‘Because they’re fools.’

‘Don’t fools get tired, then?’

‘How could fools get tired?”

 

- Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories

[LaHermes]

“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

“If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.”

― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

 

“I often find that people confuse inner peace with some sense of insensibility whenever something goes wrong. In such cases inner peace is a permit for destruction: The unyielding optimist will pretend that the forest is not burning either because he is too lazy or too afraid to go and put the fire out.”

― Criss Jami, Killosophy

 

 

“Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.”

― Jodi Picoult

[LaHermes]

"You cannot really know what today or tomorrow holds for you. Try this: instead of continuously trying to figure out what will happen, which can blind you to what’s actually going on around you, give attention to your experience as it occurs."

Padraig O'Morain

[LaHermes]

"" ... we cease exhausting ourselves so much as we learn to inhabit our own body and the only moment in which we are ever alive - this one." Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners

[RainyCoast]

SEND two Sunsets—

Day and I in competition ran,

I finished two, and several stars,

While He was making one.

 

His own is ampler—

But, as I was saying to a friend,

Mine is the more convenient

To carry in the hand.

 

-Emily inson (the filter is misinterpreting things)

[RainyCoast]

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”

“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

“With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?

“What shall we ever do?”

 

 

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

 

-T.S.Eliot

[RainyCoast]

I remain quietly here in my anonymous woods

where the stream beyond the kitchen window

is so small it is only visible when it creams to ice,

where even in spring, resurgent with rain,

all it can do is empty itself into another stream,

also small, also nameless.

 

Linda Pastan, from “Geography"

[SherrySher]

I'm tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I'm tired of never having a buddy to be with, to tell me where we's going to, coming from or why. Mostly, I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There's too much of it. It's like pieces of glass in my head, all the time. Can you understand?"

 

John Coffey, from "The Green Mile"

[SherrySher]

This is what you shall do: love the earth sun and animals, despite riches, give alms to everyone 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 hate 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 or 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 very flesh should be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but it the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and every motion and joint of your body.

 

-Walt Whitman

[RainyCoast]

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[RainyCoast]

“The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy like a bird in spring.”

― G.K. Chesterton

[RainyCoast]

“Reality is not digital, an on-off state, but analog. Something gradual. In other words, reality is a quality that things possess in the same way that they possess, say, weight. Some people are more real than others, for example. It has been estimated that there are only about five hundred real people on any given planet, which is why they keep unexpectedly running into one another all the time.”

― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

[johny55]

Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of man.

Benjamin Disraeli

[johny55]

When one door closes another opens. But often we look so long so regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.

Helen Keller