Dawn > Dawn's Quotes

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures
may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength
may we dance in the face of our fears.
”
― Gloria Anzaldúa

“Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Do work that matters. Vale la pena”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
― Émile Zola

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
― John Muir

“The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.”
― John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf: The American Naturalist's 1867 Journey Through the Post-War South

“Going to the mountains is going home.”
― John Muir

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
― Mary Oliver

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
― Mary Oliver

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
― Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
”
― Naomi Shihab Nye

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it”
― Sharon Olds

“Because the night you asked me,
the small scar of the quarter moon
had healed - the moon was whole again;
because life seemed so short;
because life stretched out before me
like the halls of a nightmare;
because I knew exactly what I wanted;
because I knew exactly nothing;
because I shed my childhood with my clothes -
they both had years of wear in them;
because your eyes were darker than my father's;
because my father said I could do better;
because I wanted badly to say no;
because Stanly Kowalski shouted "Stella...;"
because you were a door I could slam shut;
because endings are written before beginnings;
because I knew that after twenty years
you'd bring the plants inside for winter
and make a jungle we'd sleep in naked;
because I had free will;
because everything is ordained;
I said yes.”
― Linda Pastan

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin