Todd > Todd's Quotes

“He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Our heads are round so thought can change direction”
― Allen Ginsberg

“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”
― Albert Einstein

“Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. What the worthy endeavor requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up.”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

“Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa.
To the latecomers are left the bones.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

“Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
― Sigmund Freud

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That there was once one whose veins ran lightning
No eye beheld.

And tell how trampled, derided, hated,
And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
He fled for shelter to God, who mated
His soul with song-

Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death.”
― James Clarence Mangan

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.”
― Dylan Thomas

“An alcoholic is someone you don't like, who drinks as much as you do.”
― Dylan Thomas

“And now, gentlemen, like your manners, I must leave you.”
― Dylan Thomas, Rebecca's Daughters

“Mornings at Blackwater

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.

And live
your life.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.”
― Walt Whitman

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“When will I be home? I don’t know.
In the mountains, in the rainy night,
The Autumn lake is flooded.
Someday we will be back together again.
We will sit in the candlelight by the West window.
And I will tell you how I remembered you
Tonight on the stormy mountain.”
― Li Shang-Yin

“Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”
― Wendell Berry, Farming: A Hand Book

“In 20,000 walks you're bound to learn a little.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“You don't have to become what you already are, which is a relief.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods