Phyllis > Phyllis's Quotes

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.”
― William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads

“Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.”
― William Wordsworth, The Excursion 1814

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
― William Wordsworth, I Wander'd Lonely as a Cloud

“What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”
― William Wordsworth

“Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.”
― William Wordsworth

“Rest and be thankful.”
― William Wordsworth

“The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.”
― William Wordsworth, Great Narrative Poems of the Romantic Age

“Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.”
― William Wordsworth

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come”
― William Wordsworth

“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.”
― William Wordsworth

“My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;”
― William Wordsworth

“There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart.

-Michael: A Pastoral Poem”
― William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney

“Love betters what is best”
― Wordsworth

“Of all the people you will know in a lifetime,
you are the only one you will never leave or lose.
To the question of your life,
You are the only answer.
To the problems of your life,
You are the only solution.”
― Jo Coudert

“You can't hurt me the way you think you can. But even if you could? I would rather die with the taste of you on my tongue than live and never touch you again. I'm in love with you, Mara. I love you. No matter what you do.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer

“Eliza: The problem with YOU is that you don't take the RESPONSIBILITY for anything@ You think you can just run around, doing whatever you want to whoever you want, and that it's going to be fine. That everything is just going to be TAKE CARE of for you, with no consequences.

Cooper: No. I don't, and I have had consequences from what happened with me and you.

Eliza: Yeah? Like what?

Cooper: I lost you, that was my consequence.”
― Lauren Barnholdt, One Night That Changes Everything

“We try so hard to instruct our children in all the right things―teaching good from bad, explaining choices and consequences―when in reality most lessons are learned through observation and experience. Perhaps we'd be better off training our youth to be highly observant.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“I am sorry my decisions do not meet with your approval, but nevertheless, they are mine, and the consequences are also mine.”
― Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance

“Intentions do not insulate us from the consequences of our actions.”
― Jon D Harrison

“In the future, it may turn out that fossil fuels are the blood of the Earth and by extracting them may lead to serious consequences to the Earth's survival, and by association, that of the humans.”
― Steven Magee, Solar Radiation, Global Warming and Human Disease

“If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite

“Despite membership in the guild of outcasts, writers do, by quirk of fate or sex or addiction or parenthood, become intimate with others, with those who don’t originate from the planet of words and language. Other things do happen, but we don’t know what they are until we write about them, or think about them in words, or remember them in phrases.
- From "Why She Writes”
― Jayne Anne Phillips

“The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have no flowers. The flower smell is gone and the white falls off the trees. Seeds, Lark says, little seeds with parachutes to fly them, Termite, all in your hair, and she runs her fingers through his hair, saying how long and how pretty. He wants the grass long and strong, sounding whispers when it moves, but the mower cuts it. The mower cuts and cuts like a yowling knife. He hears the mower cutting and smells the grass pouring out all over the ground, the green stain so sharp and wet it spills and spills. The mower cuts everything away and Nick Tucci follows the mower, cutting and cutting while the orange cat growls low to move its soft parts across the chipped sharp stones. Deep under the lilacs where no one sees, the orange cat waits for the roar to stop.”
― Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite