Cee > Cee's Quotes

“If I live to be very old, all my memories of the glory days will grow vague and confused, till I won't be certain any of it really happened. But the books will be there, on my shelves and in my head - the one enduring reality I can be certain of till the day I die.
Of all the gifts in Q's legacy, the first still mattered most and would matter longest. If it took me a lifetime to learn that, Q won't mind. He knows I was never a very bright pupil.”
― Helene Hanff

“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Listeners and Other Poems

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Let me follow the sound of the rain
And keep pace with the infinite echo”
― Audrey Riva, Uncrossed Bridges

“From the opposite shore my eight year-old self never dreamed she'd see the blue Atlantic was the same.”
― Helene Hanff, Q's Legacy: A Delightful Account of a Lifelong Love Affair with Books

“He was born the night the Titanic went down.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“And I walk on, over the shoulder of summer and down across the red-dappled fall”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there putting it altogether, setting up always another milestone betwixt himself and me. Oh good gracious ! When first I noticed that heavy yellow house without knowing or caring to know who it belonged to, how far I was from dreaming, that trough years and years, I should carry every stone's weight of it upon fey heart”
― Jane Carlyle Aitken

“Seasons flow in a cycle.
Life too, passes through difficult winters.
But after any winter, spring will follow.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Tales from the Café

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one—the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself—is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“But I think it is also the relief I feel that those stars are immovable. Nothing you or I could do will ever alter them. They are so much bigger than us. And they will not change within our lifetime. We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay—as impossible as that can seem sometimes.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“Well, we are the stars", Joan said. "And the stars are us. Every atom in our bodies was once out there. Was once a part of them. To look at the night sky is to look at pars of who you once were, who you may one day be.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.”
― Tomas Tranströmer

“We went on and on and on, from snap to clap and back again, raging and raging, until finally there was nothing to do but raise our arms in surrender and admit that the rain was gone.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things

“We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are be definition more interesting that ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing ... Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rain trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“I stepped into those woods and my life began.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“He was, of course, a piece of the sky. His eyes said so. This is not a face; this is the other part of knowing something, when there is no proof, but neither is there any way toward disbelief. Imagine lifting the lid from a jar and finding it filled not with darkness but with light. Bird was like that. Startling, elegant, alive.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“If I could go back in time I'd make the same choice in a snap. And yet, there remains my sister life. All the other things I could have done instead. I wouldn't know what I couldn't know until I became a mom, and so I'm certain there are things I don't know because I can't know because I did. Who would I have nurtured had I not been nurturing my two children over these past seven years? In what creative and practical forces would my love have been gathered up? What didn't I write because I was catching my children at the bottoms of slides and spotting them as they balanced along the tops of low brick walls and pushing them endlessly in swings? What did I write because I did? Would I be happier and more intelligent and prettier if I had been free all this time to read in silence on a couch that sat opposite of Mr. Sugar's? Would I complain less? Has sleep deprivation and the consumption of an exorbitant number of Annie's Homegrown Organic Cheddar Bunnies taken years off my life or added years onto it? Who would I have met if I had bicycled across Iceland and hiked around Mongolia and what would I have experienced and where would that have taken me?

I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“History is merely a list of surprises,' I said. 'It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.”
― kurt vonnegut, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!