Carrie Chappell > Carrie's Quotes

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.”
― Tsunetomo Yamamoto, The Hagakure: A code to the way of samurai

“The future has an ancient heart.”
― Carlo Levi

“All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.”
― Stendhal

“The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Tomorrow is tomorrow.
Future cares have future cures,
And we must mind today.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 2

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Words were her plague and words were her redemption.”
― Hilda Doolittle, HERmione

“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know it's a funny thing about housecleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she "should" be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
― Toni Morrison