Quote_tiny Alex's quotes

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  • Tom Robbins
    "Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
    Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.
    Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
    There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?
    Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself."
    Tom Robbins


  • Sylvia Plath
    "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
    Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)


  • Sylvia Plath
    "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
    Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)


  • Sylvia Plath
    "There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but i don't know many of them."
    Sylvia Plath


  • Kurt Vonnegut
    "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
    Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)


  • Kurt Vonnegut
    "And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
    Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)


  • Kurt Vonnegut
    "One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
    Kurt Vonnegut


  • Kurt Vonnegut
    "And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.
    So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."
    Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)


  • Kurt Vonnegut
    "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
    Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
    Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
    Man got to tell himself he understand."
    Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)


  • Charles Bukowski
    "there are worse things
    than being alone
    but it often takes
    decades to realize this
    and most often when you do
    it's too late
    and there's nothing worse
    than too late"
    Charles Bukowski


  • Jane Austen
    "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
    Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)


  • C.S. Lewis
    "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
    C.S. Lewis


  • C.S. Lewis
    "You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
    C.S. Lewis


  • C.S. Lewis
    "Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
    C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)


  • Jonathan Safran Foer
    "Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
    Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)


  • Mary Oliver
    "You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
    over and over announcing your place
    in the family of things."
    Mary Oliver


  • Mary Oliver
    "to live in this world

    you must be able
    to do three things
    to love what is mortal;
    to hold it

    against your bones knowing
    your own life depends on it;
    and, when the time comes to let it go,
    to let it go"
    Mary Oliver


  • Mary Oliver
    "I tell you this
    to break your heart,
    by which I mean only
    that it break open and never close again
    to the rest of the world."
    Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems: Volume Two)


  • Jack Gilbert
    "Everyone forgets Icarus also flew. "
    Jack Gilbert


  • "Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
    like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones. "
    Jeffrey McDaniel


  • "I know loving me isn’t easy – the all-night

    helicopter parties, the glow-in-the-dark haircuts, but when I look at you

    it’s like praying with my eyes. I know it’s stupid to not own a gun yet have

    so many triggers, but in some other world gigantic seashells hold humans

    to their ears and listen to the echo of machines."
    Jeffrey McDaniel


  • William Blake
    "To See a World in a Grain of Sand
    And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
    Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
    And Eternity in an hour."
    William Blake


  • William Blake
    "The most sublime act is to set another before you."
    William Blake


  • William Blake
    "The Holy Word
    That walk'd among the ancient trees,

    Calling the lapsèd soul,
    And weeping in the evening dew;
    That might control
    The starry pole,
    And fallen, fallen light renew!"
    William Blake


  • William Butler Yeats
    "Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
    Enwrought with golden and silver light,
    The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
    Of night and light and the half light,
    I would spread the cloths under your feet:
    But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
    I have spread my dreams under your feet;
    Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
    William Butler Yeats (The Wind Among the Reeds 1899)


  • W.H. Auden
    "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
    Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
    Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
    Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

    Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
    Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
    Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
    Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

    He was my North, my South, my East and West,
    My working week and my Sunday rest,
    My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
    I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

    The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
    Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
    Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
    For nothing now can ever come to any good."
    W.H. Auden (Selected Poems)


  • W.H. Auden
    "Lay your sleeping head, my love,
    Human on my faithless arm;"
    W.H. Auden (W H Auden: Selected Poems)


  • e.e. cummings
    "I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
    than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance"
    e.e. cummings


  • e.e. cummings
    "I thank you G-d for most this amazing
    day: for leaping greenly spirits of trees
    And a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
    Which is natural which is infinite which is yes."
    e.e. cummings


  • e.e. cummings
    "may my heart always be open to little
    birds who are the secrets of living
    whatever they sing is better than to know
    and if men should not hear them men are old

    may my mind stroll about hungry
    and fearless and thirsty and supple
    and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
    for whenever men are right they are not young

    and may myself do nothing usefully
    and love yourself so more than truly
    there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
    pulling all the sky over him with one smile"
    e.e. cummings (100 Selected Poems)


  • e.e. cummings
    "my sweet old etcetera
    aunt lucy during the recent

    war could and what
    is more did tell you just
    what everybody was fighting

    for,
    my sister

    isabel created hundreds
    (and
    hundreds) of socks not to
    mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers

    etcetera wristers etcetera, my

    mother hoped that

    i would die etcetera
    bravely of course my father used
    to become hoarse talking about how it was
    a privilege and if only he
    could meanwhile my

    self etcetera lay quietly
    in the deep mud et

    cetera
    (dreaming,
    et
    cetera, of
    Your smile
    eyes knees and of your Etcetera)"
    e.e. cummings


  • e.e. cummings
    "i am a little church(no great cathedral)
    far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
    --i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
    i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

    my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
    my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
    (finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
    whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

    around me surges a miracle of unceasing
    birth and glory and death and resurrection:
    over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
    of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

    i am a little church(far from the frantic
    world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
    --i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
    i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

    winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
    merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
    standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
    (welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)"
    e.e. cummings


  • e.e. cummings
    "Now the ears of my ears are awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened."
    e.e. cummings


  • e.e. cummings
    "Buffalo Bill's
    defunct
    who used to
    ride a watersmooth-silver
    stallion
    and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
    Jesus
    he was a handsome man
    and what i want to know is
    how do you like your blueeyed boy
    Mister Death"
    e.e. cummings


  • e.e. cummings
    "since feeling is first
    who pays any attention
    to the syntax of things
    will never wholly kiss you;
    wholly to be a fool
    while Spring is in the world

    my blood approves,
    and kisses are a better fate
    than wisdom
    lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
    —the best gesture of my brain is less than
    your eyelids' flutter which says

    we are for each other: then
    laugh, leaning back in my arms
    for life's not a paragraph

    And death i think is no parenthesis"
    e.e. cummings


  • Albert Camus
    "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
    Albert Camus


  • Albert Camus
    "There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."
    Albert Camus


  • Albert Camus
    "Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."
    Albert Camus


  • Mother Teresa
    "People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
    If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

    If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

    If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

    The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

    Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

    For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
    Mother Teresa


  • C.S. Lewis
    "(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
    C.S. Lewis


  • C.S. Lewis
    "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
    C.S. Lewis


  • C.S. Lewis
    "A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word "darkness" on the walls of his cell."
    C.S. Lewis


  • Dorothy Parker
    "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
    Dorothy Parker


  • C.S. Lewis
    "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
    C.S. Lewis


  • Abraham Lincoln
    "...my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side..."
    Abraham Lincoln


  • C.S. Lewis
    "He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less."
    C.S. Lewis


  • Augustine of Hippo
    "Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him."
    Augustine of Hippo


  • "My soul doth magnify the Lord,
    And my spirit hath rejoiced in god my Saviour.

    Luke 1:46-47"
    Luke


  • John Piper
    "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him"
    John Piper


  • Helen Keller
    "For three things I thank God every day of my life: thanks that he has vouchsafed me knowledge of his works; deep thanks that he has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to--a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song."
    Helen Keller



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