Cindy Cunningham > Cindy's Quotes

“Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.”
― Henry James

“I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.”
― Henry James

“Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”
― Henry James

“Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.”
― Henry James

“It's time to start living the life you've imagined.”
― Henry James

“I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.”
― Henry James

“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
― Philip Pullman

“I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.”
― Philip Pullman

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.”
― Linda Pastan

“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.”
― Randall Jarell

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Leaving Forever

My son can look me level in the eyes now,
and does, hard, when I tell him he cannot watch
chainsaw murders at the midnight movie,
that he must bend his mind to Biology,
under this roof, in the clear light of a Tensor lamp.
Outside, his friends throb with horsepower
under the moon.

He stands close, milk sour
on his breath, gauging the heat of my conviction,
eye-whites pink from his new contacts.
He can see me better than before. And I can see
myself in those insolent eyes, mostly head
in the pupil's curve, closed in by the contours
of his unwrinkled flesh.

At the window he waves
a thin arm and his buddies squall away in a glare
of tail lights. I reach out my arm to his shoulder,
but he shrugs free and shows me my father's narrow eyes,
the trembling hand at my throat, the hard wall
at the back of my skull, the raised fist framed
in the bedroom window I had climbed through
at three A.M.

"If you hit me I'll leave forever,"
I said. But everything was fine in a few days, fine.
"I would have come back," I said, "false teeth and all."
Now, twice a year after the long drive, in the yellow light
of the front porch, I breathe in my father's whiskey,
ask for a shot, and see myself distorted in
his thick glasses, the two of us grinning,
as he holds me with both hands at arm's length.”
― Ron Smith, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery: Poems

“I read; I travel; I become”
― Derek Walcott

“Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.”
― John Keats

“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.”
― Mary Karr

“I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.”
― Darin Strauss, Half a Life

“A word of warning here. The events as you remember them will never be the same in your memory once you have turned them into a memoir. For years I have worried that if I turn all of my life into literature, I won't have any real life left - just stories about it. And it is a realistic concern: it does happen like that. I am no longer sure I remember how it felt to be twenty and living in Spain after my parents died; my book about it stands now between me and my memories. When I try to think about that time, what comes to mind most readily is what I wrote.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

“I write so that my handful of pebbles, cast daily into still waters, will produce a ripple. ”
― Anne Schroeder

“There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equakity will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind be chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“The man who can be contented to live with a pretty and useful companion who has no mind has lost in voluptuous gratifications a taste for more refined pleasures; he has never felt the calm and refreshing satisfaction. . . .of being loved by someone who could understand him.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“I guess that's how people go on, without
knowing how.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems

“but he does not want to talk about it,
he wants a stillness at the end of it.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems