Alison May > Alison's Quotes

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”
― Virginia Woolf

“The cruel irony of housework:
people only notice when you don't do it.”
― Danielle Raine, Housework Blues - A Survival Guide

“How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?

Just one way, you do get back home. You have a boy or a girl of your own and now and then you remember, and you know how they feel, and it's almost the same as if you were your own self again, as young as you could remember.

And God knows he was lucky, so many ways, and God knows he was thankful. Everything was good and better than he could have hoped for, better than he ever deserved; only, whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.”
― James Agee, A Death in the Family

“I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices

“I've always wanted to be a cat. Warm and domesticated when you want to be, wild when you don't.”
― Jenny Downham, Before I Die

“Buy or borrow self-improvement books, but don't read them. Stack them around your bedroom and use them as places to rest bowls of cookies.

Watch exercise shows on television, but don't do the exercises. Practice believing that the benefit lies in imagining yourself doing the exercises.

Don't power walk. Saunter slowly in the sun, eating chocolate, and carry a blanket so you can take a nap.”
― SARK

“Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The heart that
breaks open can
contain the
whole universe.”
― Joanna Macy

“Here's to the kids.

The kids who would rather spend their night with a bottle of coke & Patrick or Sonny playing on their headphones than go to some vomit-stained high school party.
Here's to the kids whose 11:11 wish was wasted on one person who will never be there for them.
Here's to the kids whose idea of a good night is sitting on the hood of a car, watching the stars.
Here's to the kids who never were too good at life, but still were wicked cool.
Here's to the kids who listened to Fall Out boy and Hawthorne Heights before they were on MTV...and blame MTV for ruining their life.
Here's to the kids who care more about the music than the haircuts.
Here's to the kids who have crushes on a stupid lush.
Here's to the kids who hum "A Little Less 16 Candles, A Little More Touch Me" when they're stuck home, dateless, on a Saturday night.
Here's to the kids who have ever had a broken heart from someone who didn't even know they existed.
Here's to the kids who have read The Perks of Being a Wallflower & didn't feel so alone after doing so.
Here's to the kids who spend their days in photobooths with their best friend(s).
Here's to the kids who are straight up smartasses & just don't care.
Here's to the kids who speak their mind.
Here's to the kids who consider screamo their lullaby for going to sleep.
Here's to the kids who second guess themselves on everything they do.
Here's to the kids who will never have 100 percent confidence in anything they do, and to the kids who are okay with that.
Here's to the kids.
This one's not for the kids,
who always get what they want,
But for the ones who never had it at all.
It's not for the ones who never got caught,
But for the ones who always try and fall.
This one's for the kids who didnt make it,
We were the kids who never made it.
The Overcast girls and the Underdog Boys.
Not for the kids who had all their joys.
This one's for the kids who never faked it.
We're the kids who didn't make it.
They say "Breaking hearts is what we do best,"
And, "We'll make your heart be ripped of your chest"
The only heart that I broke was mine,
When I got My Hopes up too too high.
We were the kids who didnt make it.
We are the kids who never made it.”
― Pete Wentz

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
― Jean Cocteau

“A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“Well, sometimes home is a person.”
― Beth Revis, A Million Suns

“Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“The woman who makes a sweet, beautiful home, filling it with love and prayer and purity, is doing something better than anything else her hands could find to do beneath the skies.”
― J.R. Miller, Home-Making

“I wonder if it will be—can be—any more beautiful than this,’ murmured Anne, looking around her with the loving, enraptured eyes of those to whom ‘home’ must always be the loveliest spot in the world, no matter what fairer lands may lie under alien stars.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in the world...How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?...I wanted to go out and do things--write books, speak out. I've been driven by that. I don't know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to BE at home--and really, to be in herself. It's actually very beautiful what she does...I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home.”
― Sue Monk Kidd

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When I’m a Duchess,” she said to herself (not in a very hopeful tone though), “I won’t have any pepper in my kitchen at all. Soup does very well without. Maybe it’s always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,” she went on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, “and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that; then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“I enjoy doing housework, ironing, washing, cooking, dishwashing. Whenever I get one of those questionaires and they ask what is your profession, I always put down housewife. It's an admirable profession, why apologize for it. You aren't stupid because you're a housewife. When you're stirring the jam you can read Shakespeare.”
― Tasha Tudor

“Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls… searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor… What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.”
― Keith Floyd

“Mothers were the only ones you could depend on to tell the whole, unvarnished truth.”
― Margaret Dilloway, How to Be an American Housewife

“For she is a fair maiden, fairest lady of a house of queens. And yet I know not how I should speak of her. When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die?
- Aragorn about Éowyn”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“All serious daring starts from within.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman.”
― Maya Angelou

“When my late father died — now I'm in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.”
― Jonathan Sacks

“speak quietly to yourself & promise there will be better days. whisper gently to yourself and provide assurance that you really are extending your best effort. console your bruised and tender spirit with reminders of many other successes. offer comfort in practical and tangible ways - as if you were encouraging your dearest friend. recognize that on certain days the greatest grace is that the day is over and you get to close your eyes. tomorrow comes more brightly...”
― mary anne radmacher

“If you can show people how to build castles, make sure you do not neglect building and nurturing your own.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem