Meaghan > Meaghan's Quotes

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“A Saigon Proverb: Doe la chine tran, neu buon la thua. Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“The hemulen woke up slowly and recognised himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November

“The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It's a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you've got in as many supplies as you can. It's nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won't find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November

“I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!”
― Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 01

“You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.”
― Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
― Barry Lopez

“And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago walked into, the father who used to carry you on his shoulders high above the crowds at the summer fair, his body now ashes and shards of bone. You hold these things in place on a page, you walk through that door, touch his face and smell the cigarette smoke on his breath and in his shirt, you make things breathe again in words. You feel the lightness of a ghostly touch across your skin. In that small house on the corner, the porch light suddenly comes on.”
― Lorna Crozier, Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier

“Anyway, who in their right mind would ever say a person was supposed to be happy? In your life happiness is either cut to your length or isn't.”
― Norman, Howard

“Everything I loved most happened most every day.”
― Howard Norman, I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

“I can only repeat what I say to myself day and night: I expect nothing, yet life keeps taking unexpected turns.”
― Howard Norman, The Museum Guard: A Novel

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen

“There is another world, and it is in this one.”
― Paul Éluard

“Moominpappa: "Tell us all that's happening out in the world!"

Snufkin: "Fuss and misery."

- from "Moomin and Family Life" comic strip”
― Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 01

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“From what I have seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate.”
― Michael Crummey, Galore

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“All religions are true but none are literal.”
― Joseph Campbell

“As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.
Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance.
Having a sense of humor saves you.”
― Joseph Campbell

“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics