Julie > Julie's Quotes

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“For those who confuse you, recognize that their confusion is theirs and your clarity is yours.”
― Barbara Marciniak, Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living

“Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.”
― Barbara Marciniak

“It is important to speak your truth, not to convince anyone else of it. Everyone must make up their own minds.”
― Barbara Marciniak, Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living

“The hills in the distance held my life in a bowl filled with everything I could possibly want.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“..and why the winter suns so rush to bathe themselves in the sea
and what slows down the nights to a long lingering crawl...”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“What good are prayers and shrines to a person mad with love? The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour, and deep in her heart the silent wound lives on.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“What a tale he's told, what a bitter bowl of war he's drunk to the dregs.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“The seeds of life - fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that's born for death. That is the source of all men's fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heaven's light, shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future.”
― Piper Kerman

“They came back
To widows,
To fatherless children,
To screams, to sobbing.
The men came back
As little clay jars
Full of sharp cinders.”
― Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides

“Sir U__ fell down from a speeding train,
Which did some damage to his brain,
And after that he did not know
How to pronounce the letter O.”
― Gorey, Edward

“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

“the things that she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.”
― Edith Wharton

“he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“...man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.”
― Primo Levi

“Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows.... A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Gustav Flaubert

“Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.”
― William Faulkner

“On Stripping Bark from Myself

(for Jane, who said trees die from it)

Because women are expected to keep silent about
their close escapes I will not keep silent
and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will
please
mark the spot
where I fall and know I could not live
silent in my own lies
hearing their 'how nice she is!'
whose adoration of the retouched image
I so despise.

No. I am finished with living
for what my mother believes
for what my brother and father defend
for what my lover elevates
for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes
to embrace.

I find my own
small person
a standing self
against the world
an equality of wills
I finally understand.

Besides:

My struggle was always against
an inner darkness: I carry within myself
the only known keys
to my death – to unlock life, or close it shut
forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color
yellow
and the sun, I am happy to fight
all outside murderers
as I see I must.”
― Alice Walker, Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965-1990 Complete

“Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”
― Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

“The silver trump of freedom roused in my soul eternal wakefulness.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon the slave and slaveholder.”
― Frederick Douglass

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of the slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery,--that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass