Karen Kay > Karen's Quotes

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#1

“The sky in Seattle is so low, it felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us. Every feeling I ever knew was up in that sky. Twinkling joyous sunlight; airy, giggle cloud wisps; blinding columns of sun. Orbs of gold, pink. flesh, utterly cheesy in their luminosity. Gigantic puffly clouds, welcoming, forgiving, repeating infinitely across the horizon as if between mirrors; and slices of rain, pounding wet misery in the distance now, but soon on us, and in another part of the sky, a black stain, rainless.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

tags: clouds, moods, rain, seattle

10 likes

#2

“The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

tags: dawn, sea, sleep

67 likes

#3

“in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

tags: charles-tansley, lily-briscoe, philosophy

6 likes

#4

“So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

tags: clouds, morning, sea, sky, wind

227 likes

#5

“...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

187 likes

#6

“Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

139 likes

#7

“Submit to me."

So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore, wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen alseep, she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts. They have no suffering there, she thought.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

tags: cam-ramsay

31 likes

#8

“I sat there and my love to him poured out more and more, and, lo, he flew down to a stump, and then to my knee. I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the important thing is the love that goes out from oneself.”
― Agnes Grinstead Anderson, Approaching the Magic Hour: Memories of Walter Anderson

tags: art, artist, birding, birdwatching, walter-anderson

3 likes

#9

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

tags: childhood, laughter, love, oblivious

2266 likes

#10

“Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: face, lovely

3 likes

#11

“a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: promise, world

0 likes

#12

“Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labor of the cow”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

tags: labor

6 likes

#13

“..could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of pinks”
― Kate Atkinson

tags: peppery, pink, smell

2 likes

#14

“...somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird - all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I'd never noticed before.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

tags: dusk, sad-beauty

5 likes

#15

“Running, the music flew into him, became the wind that pushed back his hair and the slap of his own feet on the pavement.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

tags: music, running

3 likes

#16

“it felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

4 likes

#17

“...yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink.”
― Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale

tags: moon, night, sky

5 likes

#18

“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon.”
― Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale

tags: garden, scent, swoon, tennyson

4 likes

#19

“I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

tags: cat, cat-people, cats, integrity, meditation, peace, sereneity, spirituality, wisdom, zen, zen-master

874 likes

#20

“Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.”
― Eckhart Tolle

118 likes

#21

“Die before you die, there is no chance after.”
― C.S. Lewis

193 likes

#22

“When "Here Comes the Sun" started, what happened? No, the sun didn't come out, but Mom opened up like the sun breaking through the clouds. You know how in the first few notes of that song, there's something about George's guitar that's just so hopeful? It was like when Mom sang, she was full of hope, too. She even got the irregular clapping right during the guitar solo. When the song was over, she paused.

"Oh Bee," she said. "This song reminds me of you." She had tears in her eyes.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

42 likes

#23

“It seems that these old cards were conceived deep in the guts of human experience, at the most profound level of the human psyche. It is to this level in ourselves that they will speak.”
― Sallie Nichols

tags: jung, psyche, tarot

4 likes

#24

“The psyche is a self-regulating system whose aim is not perfection but wholeness and equilibrium.”
― Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey

4 likes

#25

“By viewing images we cast onto outer reality as mirror reflections of inner reality, we come to know ourselves.”
― Sallie Nichols

tags: images, know-ourselves, reality

2 likes

#26

“... a full moon shimmered over central Louisiana. This was no rinky-dink moon. This was a moon you had to curtsy to. A big, heavy, mysterious, beautiful, bossy moon. The kind you want to serve things to on a silver platter.”
― Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

58 likes

#27

“She saw night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn out cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayou”
― Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

tags: babies, bayou, cotton, creeks, seersucker, trees

7 likes

#28

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

tags: joy, life, nature

1266 likes

#29

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

tags: alive, ecstasy, life

409 likes