"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"There is no remedy for love, but to love more."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman

"I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world."
— Walt Whitman

"And your very flesh shall be a great poem."
— Walt Whitman

"Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me."
— Walt Whitman

"Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. "
— Walt Whitman

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road: The Original Scroll)

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
— Anaïs Nin

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
— Anaïs Nin

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."
— Anaïs Nin

"Moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn, just as I followed him. "
— Leslie Marmon Silko (Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit)

"So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?"
— Louise Erdrich (The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year)

"You are your best thing"
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself."
— Alice Walker

"Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm. "
— Alice Walker

"you will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf
know you could tumble at any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

--The Art of Disappearing"
— Naomi Shihab Nye (Salting the Ocean: 100 Poems by Young Poets)

"Anyone who says,“Here’s my address, write me a poem,”deserves something in reply.So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide.In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping.They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them."
— Naomi Shihab Nye

"Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.


Colombia"
— Naomi Shihab Nye (Words Under the Words: Selected Poems)

"I want to be someone making music/with my coming."
— Naomi Shihab Nye (A Maze Me: Poems for Girls)

"I am five, I will never understand
why we are stranded in our selves
but in this moment I know
my own story
is understanding our singleness
that I am destined to move my body and time
into the body-time
the story
of Others."
— Sharon Doubiago (Hard Country)

"Nature is not a place to visit. It is home."
— Gary Snyder

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."
— Gary Snyder

"But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."
— James Joyce

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world. "
— Virginia Woolf

"The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. "
— Virginia Woolf

"I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. "
— Virginia Woolf

"I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer? "
— Virginia Woolf

"I would prefer not to."
— Herman Melville (Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."
— Herman Melville (Moby-Dick: or, The Whale)

"I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"I dwell in possibility…"
— Emily Dickinson

"Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail --
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --
And handled with a Chain --"
— Emily Dickinson

"Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"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."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Without poets, without artists... everything would fall a part into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit."
— Guillaume Apollinaire (Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire)

"You can never have too much sky . You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"I'm a witch woman- high on tobacco and holy water. I'm a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A profession of sorts...I have the magic of words. The power to charm and kill at will."
— Sandra Cisneros

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
— Anaïs Nin