Laura > Laura's Quotes

“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“The last act is the greatest treason. To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
― T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“Teach us to care and not to care”
― T.S. Eliot

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
― T.S. Eliot

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.”
― T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

“I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow”
― T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

“Is it the sea you hear in me?
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.

--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“No day is safe from news of you.

--from "The Rival", written July 1961”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Where is the Life we lost in living?”
― T.S. Eliot

“I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war, ”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs. Peniston's mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as Lily's. As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitutde, but compassion holding its breath.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
― Robert Frost

“I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.”
― Robert Frost

“I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.”
― Robert Frost, Birches

“How many things would you attempt
If you knew you could not fail”
― Robert Frost

“I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
― Robert Frost

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country