Skye Harmony > Skye's Quotes

“Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
― Joan Didion

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”
― Flannery O'Connor , Wise Blood

“[I]t doesn’t matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don’t know who you are, or if you’ve forgotten or misplaced her, then you’ll always feel as if you don’t belong. Anywhere. (xiii)”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Moving On: Creating Your House of Belonging with Simple Abundance

“Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”
― Gary Snyder

“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Love Over Scotland

“When you get lost in a really strange place,
nothing is more comforting than found your
friend whom you trust and can show the way.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other
than just getting older.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

“This is the place of places and and it is here.”
― Gertrude Stein

“I love tables. And dancing. Oh, and I love table dancing, although Grandmother always says, "Wait until we're finished eating.”
― Jarod Kintz, There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't

“And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“I cut an inch off of every straw I see, just to make the world suck a little less.
”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title

“His grandmother had taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence. There are millions of people in this world, she had told him, and the spirits will see that most of them, you never have to meet. But there are one or two that you are tied to, and spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.”
― Jodi Picoult

“The Everlasting Staircase"
Jeffrey McDaniel

When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live,
my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit

from this planet for a week? I've got places to do,
people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs,

said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded
a red eyeball and shot across America,

hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep
the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up

poor in Appalachia. And while world war II
functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression,

she believed poverty was a double feature,
that the comfort of her adult years was merely

an intermission, that hunger would hobble back,
hurl its prosthetic leg through her window,

so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques
Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit

stuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chin
dangling like the boots of a hanged man --

I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest
and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever

plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats.
I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there.

The point is I knew, holding the one-sided
conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart

was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it,
the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap off

in your grasp. But when Grandma's last breath
waltzed from that room, my heart opened

wide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die.
She simply found a silence she could call her own.”
― Jeffrey McDaniel

“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-y-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?”
― John Milton, The Complete Poetry