Laura > Laura's Quotes

“What greater violence can be done to the poet’s experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? …It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Poetry is man’s best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Few pay attention to the histories and the root pictures words can release. These neglected qualities are there, however, and the poets have always found them a self-delighting source of excitement.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“Good writing tends to present evidence rather than judgments. When the evidence is well presented, the reader’s judgments will agree with those implicit in the writing. But nothing is more disastrous to the communication between writer and reader than a series of implicit judgments with which the reader cannot agree or which he finds to be simply silly or for which he is given no evidence he can respect.”
― John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

“You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone”
― John Ciardi

“For the writer who truly loves language, a trip to the copy editor is like a week at a spa. You come out looking younger, trimmer, and standing straighter.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

“Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“She talks about being a Christian as if it’s a gym membership you can sign up for.”
― Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

“Angels do not tire, said the Angel, because they do not scrimp on their strength. If you are not thinking about the finiteness of your strength, you will not tire, either. Know, O Areseny, that only he who does not fear drowning is capable of walking on water.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“But what death is not stupid? asked Arseny. Is it not stupid that coarse iron enters the flesh, violating its perfection? He who is not capable of creating even a fingernail on a little finger is destroying a most complex mechanism, something inaccessible to human comprehension (264).”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin

“A person is not born ready-made. He studies, analyzes his experience, and builds his personal history. He needs time for that…
O friend, I do not question the necessity of time. We simply need to remember that only the material world needs time”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“Being a mosaic does not necessarily mean scattering into pieces, answered Elder Innokenty. It is only up close that each separate little stone seems not to be connected to the others. There is something more important in each of them, O Laurus: striving for the one who looks from afar. For the one who is capable of seizing all the small stones at once. It is he who gathers them with his gaze. That, O Laurus, is how it is in your life, too. You have dissolved yourself in God. You disrupted the unity of your life, renouncing your name and your very identity. But in the mosaic of your life there is also something that joins all these separate parts: it is an aspiration for Him. They will gather together again in Him.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“People encounter one another (thought Ambrogio), bumping into one another like atoms. They do not have their own trajectories and so their actions are random. But when taken together, those random events (so thought Ambrogio) were their own form of consistency, which could be predictable in certain parts. Only He Who created everything knows this in full.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“What is a soul?” Arseny asked.
It is what the Lord breathes into the body, what distinguishes us from rocks and plants. The soul makes us living beings, O Arseny. I compare the soul to a flame that originates in an earthly candle but has not earthly nature as it strives skyward, toward its kindred elements”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Nowhere does Niemeyer set out a specific aesthetic. In “The Autonomous Man” he notes that the imagination can be used for good or ill. In the broadest sense, he believed that the imagination could move either in the direction of autonomy, creating self-enclosed systems, or in the direction of participation, that is, a deepening of our sense of the mystery that surrounds our existence.”
― Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

“We have had a number of books casting the acid of angry rejection over the spirit of our age. They are not in error; it is only that in many cases they do not get us anywhere.”
― Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

“The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.”
― Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I do not like being thwarted, but shall I receive good from the God and not also trouble? The voices that say Recover so you can get back to normal, grossly underestimate the gift of this wrecked life. Why is it a gift? Because I would have no compelling reason to step from my comfortable existence into the quest for what’s next if my present security wasn’t taken from me. It is rare for a man to plan his own journey toward growth and change. Usually these journeys are thrust on us unexpectedly… If my ego tried to plan this journey, it would be limited by the expectations of what I would already hope to find. There would be no element of surprise, wonder, or faith--just a forced march towards a future my present self assumes is what I need. THat would not be a journey of faith but of control--and a fool’s errand. Faith is the conviction to trust that there are good things out beyond what I can see and would never know to pursue--glorious things God himself will bring to pass. I need those glorious things.”
― Russ Ramsey, Struck: One Christian's Reflections on Encountering Death

“If I wanted, I could come up with reasons to be angry with everyone I know; there are sins of commission or omission I could hang on every last person in my life… The truth is, I will never run out of people to indict. We are all guilty of so many failures to love well that if I wanted--and sometimes I do want--I could find some fault or transgression in everyone I know that I could then use to justify writing them off. I could blaze that trail to hell if I wanted to, and just the thought of it scares me off”
― Russ Ramsey, Struck: One Christian's Reflections on Encountering Death

“We want the people around us to show us a satisfactory measure of genuine empathy, but no one has any idea what that looks like. This puts everyone in the precarious position of guaranteed failure. I know that no one knows how to deal with stuff like this. There are no experts here.”
― Russ Ramsey, Struck: One Christian's Reflections on Encountering Death

“There is something holy about taking up the task of stewarding a life, especially our own. If we come to this work at all, we must come with humble expectations and a willingness to be led. We submit to the process, trusting that the science is sound, even when what we’re called to do hurts.”
― Russ Ramsey, Struck: One Christian's Reflections on Encountering Death

“If the great paradox of Christianity means anything it means this- that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it. Carlyle was quite wrong; we have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule. Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live “above” our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, “We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve’s calling to care for a specific place, and God’s instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities.”15”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love. 24.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“We should not decide how to pray based on the experiences and feelings we want. Instead, we should do everything possible to behold our God as he is, and prayer will follow.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“This rebellion wasn't a clean, fresh start. It was a fresh wound across a landscape where the scars already ran too deep”
― H. G. Parry