DeeDee > DeeDee's Quotes

“Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.
It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.
It's not a weakness.
It's your best strength.”
― Patrick Ness, The Ask and the Answer

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”
― Anne Lamott

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night.

I open mine as wide as possible.
I like to see everything, I say.
What’s there to see?

Moon. Air. Sunrise.
All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up.
I like to wake up.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God