"Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement."
— e.e. cummings

"In the world outside this glass room, songbirds are feeding and resting in the trees. Some will take off tonight and not land until they reach Venezuela. Sandpipers, plovers, and broad-winged hawks have already left for Patagonia and Panama. Bats are headed for caves in Kentucky and Tennessee. Out in the Atlantic, humpback whales pass by on their way to the Caribbean. Even now, Canada geese are honking toward us from Quebec. It is a good day for the beginnings of journeys.
Every time I look at you, I think, Now I cannot die."
— Sandra Steingraber (Having Faith)

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"the sun is within me and so is the moon"
— Kabir

"The world is full of miracles. The world is nothing but miracles! And yet we keep asking for more."
— Fredrick Leboyer

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The one you confront in Yoga is yourself. All that is rigid and stiff in you, all that says 'No.'"
— Frederick Leboyer

"Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question."
— e.e. cummings

"If I had a dime for everytime that I was wrong, I'd be broke."
— Stephen Colbert

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
— e.e. cummings

"Love is the real power. It's the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with--everyone blooms."
— Marion Woodman

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

"Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket."
— Stacy Schiff

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."
— Maya Angelou

"Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told."
— Carolyn Heilbrun

""My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style" "
— Maya Angelou

"Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter."
— Carolyn Heilbrun

"When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true."
— Paulo Coelho

"You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country--indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky--provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut...
...Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that."
— Annie Proulx (Close Range: Wyoming Stories)

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is."
— Barbara Kingsolver (High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never)

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction."
— Albert Einstein

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home."
— Adam Haslett (You Are Not a Stranger Here: Stories)

"The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Now, at Suiattle Pass, Brower was still talking about butterflies. He said he had raised them from time to time and had often watched them emerge from the chrysalis--first a crack in the case, then a feeler, and in an hour a butterfly. He said he had felt that he wanted to help, to speed them through the long and awkward procedure; and he had once tried. The butterflies came out with extended abdomens, and their wings were balled together like miniature clenched fists. Nothing happened. They sat there until they died. 'I have never gotten over that,' he said. 'That kind of information is all over in the country, but it's not in town.'"
— John McPhee

"since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid"
— e.e. cummings (E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962)

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
— John Muir

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

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

""Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.""
— Terry Tempest Williams (Finding Beauty in a Broken World)

"If you can't be a hero, you can at least be funny while being a chicken."
— Ina May Gaskin

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"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."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden, or Life in the Woods)

"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly."
— Henry David Thoreau

"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)

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden, or Life in the Woods)

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light."
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain

"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others."
— Leo Tolstoy

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."
— Anne Frank (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl)

"Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place."
— Boris Pasternak

"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality."
— C.S. Lewis

"And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?"
— Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)

"The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity."
— Dorothy Parker

"We sleep to time's hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if ever we wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of time uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it's time to toss things, like our reason, and our will; then it's time to break our necks for home.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times."
— Annie Dillard (Holy the Firm)