Deb > Deb's Quotes

“There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
( and if you and I should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves”
― e.e. cummings, Collected Poems

“Did I live the spring I’d sought?
It’s true in joy, I walked along,
took part in dance,
and sang the song.
and never tried to bind an hour
to my borrowed garden bower;
nor did I once entreat
a day to slumber at my feet.

Yet days aren’t lulled by lyric song,
like morning birds they pass along,
o’er crests of trees, to none belong;
o’er crests of trees of drying dew,
their larking flight, my hands, eschew
Thus I’ll say it once and true…

From all that I saw,
and everywhere I wandered,
I learned that time cannot be spent,
It only can be squandered.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“The hour of spring was dark at last,
sensuous memories of sunlight past,
I stood alone in garden bowers
and asked the value of my hours.
Time was spent or time was tossed,
Life was loved and life was lost.
I kissed the flesh of tender girls,
I heard the songs of vernal birds.
I gazed upon the blushing light,
aware of day before the night.

So let me ask and hear a thought:
Did I live the spring I’d sought?
It's true in joy, I walked along,
took part in dance,
and sang the song.
and never tried to bind an hour
to my borrowed garden bower;
nor did I once entreat
a day to slumber at my feet.

Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song,
like morning birds they pass along,
o'er crests of trees, to none belong;
o'er crests of trees of drying dew,
their larking flight, my hands, eschew
Thus I’ll say it once and true...

From all that I saw,
and everywhere I wandered,
I learned that time cannot be spent,
It only can be squandered.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“She was a free bird: queen of the world and laughing.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a 'wanderess.' Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences - whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“A cool breeze stirred my hair at that moment, as the night wind began to come down from the hills, but it felt like a breath from another world.”
― Francis Marion Crawford, For the Blood is the Life and Other Stories

“As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened”
― Kazuo Ishiguro

“Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

“Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.”
― Yukio Mishima, After the Banquet

“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100/Methuselah's Children

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“I felt violated, yet I had no voice, no ability to express that. I was conditioned to believe any boundary I wanted was a betrayal of her, so I stayed silent. Cooperative.”
― Jennette McCurdy