Elisa > Elisa's Quotes

“To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth. . . .

In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out the other. Thus we lose faith with our own lives.
--Adrienne Rich
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying”
― Adrienne Rich

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. "
Ranier Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet”
― RANIER MARIA RILKE

“Much was possible to a man in solitude; perhaps the final transmutations and achievements in the zones on the yonder side of the central Knowledge were possible only to the spirit in solitude. But some things were possible only to a man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly. Only in such a balance could humility be found, humility which was a lucid speed to welcome lucidity whenever and wherever it presented itself.”
― Charles Williams, Charles Williams: Collected Works

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“In case of snow
Drifting toward winter,
Don’t try to stay awake through the long winter night, afraid of freezing--
The bottom of your mind knows all about zero;
It will turn you over
And shake you till you waken.
-- David Wagoner”
― David Wagoner