Elizabeth > Elizabeth's Quotes

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.”
― W.S. Merwin

“To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.”
― John Cowper Powys

“People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine. . . . I always wondered, ``Why has nobody discovered me?'' In school, didn't they see that I'm cleverer than anybody in this school? That the teachers are stupid, too? That all they had was information that I didn't need? I got fuckin' lost in being at high school. I used to say to me auntie
``You throw my fuckin' poetry out, and you'll regret it when I'm famous, '' and she threw the bastard stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin' genius or whatever I was, when I was a child. It was obvious to me. Why didn't they put me in art school? Why didn't they train me? Why would they keep forcing me to be a fuckin' cowboy like the rest of them? I was different
I was always different. Why didn't anybody notice me? A couple of teachers would notice me, encourage me to be something or other, to draw or to paint - express myself. But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fuckin' dentist or a teacher”
― John Lennon

“[Homeschooling]...recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons.”
― Raymond S. Moore, School Can Wait

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“I would love to say
that you
make me
weak in the knees
but
to be quite upfront
and completely
truthful
you
make my body
forget
it has knees
at all.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson, Love Language

“Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“What an utter disgrace it would be to find something truly magic and spend any time at all pretending and trying to convince yourself it is all just an unbelievably orchestrated and beautifully choreographed illusion.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“Oh what we could be
if we stopped
carrying the remains
of who we were.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“I have blisters on my feet from dancing alone with your ghost.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“I would rather wear honest tears than the most beautiful and elaborately faked smile.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“Sometimes
the only way
to catch
your breath
is to
lose it
completely.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series

“As if you were on fire from within.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”
― Pablo Neruda

“But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.”
― Pablo Neruda

“With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know there's nothing but light when I see you.”
― Shinji Moon

“Remember,
a stranger once told you that the breeze
here is something worth writing poems about.”
― Shinji Moon

“You will fall in love with train rides, and sooner or later you will
realize that nowhere seems like home anymore.”
― Shinji Moon

“And still,
Your mouth on my mouth
Is a thought as fresh as
Melting icicles away
With my breath”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“I don’t want to know what your favorite color is
but I do want to know what color you bleed
when you’re with me.”
― Shinji Moon

“I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.”
― Shinji Moon, The Anatomy of Being

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“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

“I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness”
― E.E. Cummings, Poems, 1923-1954

“Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.”
― E.E. Cummings

“and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you”
― E.E. Cummings