Lorna Gray > Lorna's Quotes

“I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that's it, an always within never.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.”
― Anatole France

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“Each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us glossy and colorful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“Between skin and skin, there is only light.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything

“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
― John Lennon

“Dreams, if they're any good, are always a little bit crazy. ”
― Ray Charles

“Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth.

[Verse 223]”
― Siddhārtha Gautama, The Dhammapada

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“Some animals can see only in black and white, so everything is a shade of grey, others can see in various colors. If you cease to look at something and it continues to exist, what color does it have? The color one species sees it in, or the color another species sees it in? Clearly it can't be grey and have another color at the same time. The same applies to other sense perceptions, a vibration in the air sounds different to different species, the same odour can smell different to different species. Remove the observer, what sound or smell continues to exist. The way one observer hears the sound or the way the other observer hears it? Does an odour continue to exist the way one observer smells it or the way another smells it? Something cannot be of different colors, smells or sounds at the same time. Clearly the sense perceptions a particular observer has disappear when the observer ceases to be making an observation.”
― Rochelle Forrester, Sense Perception and Reality: A Theory of Perceptual Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and the Observer Dependent Universe

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
― Mary Oliver

“Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.”
― Mary Oliver

“The Uses Of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.”
― David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

“If we’re not supposed to dance, Why all this music?”
― Gregory Orr

“Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.

To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems