Anne Fall > Anne's Quotes

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

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

“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood

“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.”
― Boris Pasternak

“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.”
― Boris Pasternak

“The stark nude trees
are old and surviving
without attempting modesty.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“He danced closely but never touched.
The air between them crackling and sparkling like an electrical fire
that must be contained quickly
or it will take everything.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“I dreamt of land but that was so long ago.
I don't even know if he still exists.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“Wintering over geraniums
with their pale green gingko leaves─
they have not died, and neither has she,
but the blooms are gone,
and every part of her longs
for red.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“To reach the spirit world
To be free of these promises


I would find you, and we would laugh
at the old ways we tried to love.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“So, I show my uncovered scars
with a sense of pride.
Damn you and damn me.
If we cross swords, neither of us will survive.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“Autumn is here and winter is coming.
Two guests I could do without.
I am afraid of them, these strangers
living outside my greenhouse.
They press against the glass, voyeurs,
these seasonal saboteurs.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“Go.

The word is my last and most beautiful gift.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“I am a weapon.
I am laughter taunting.
I have nothing to lose,
a woman judged and found wanting.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“I am self-contained, a woman unchained.
Has there ever been a creature more disdained?”
― Anne Fall

“The petals are the texture of his lips.
The color is mine.”
― Anne Fall, Rosa Scriptum

“They are not long, the days of wine and roses.”
― Ernest Dowson, Collected Poems

“...a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.”
― Clive Bell

“Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“He said, I've been coming for you on a hard road. I'm never letting you go. Never.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“He saw with sorrow that hers was a life he could step right into and keep working at hard from tonight until death. If he allowed himself to ponder it for a minute, he saw all the world hanging over the girl like the deadfall to a trap, ready to drop and crush.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“Had she been an old woman who long ago in her youth sang beautifully, one might have said that she had learned to use the diminished nature of her voice to maximum effect, that it was a lesson in how to live with damage, how to make peace with it and use it for what it can do. But she was not an old woman.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“O herring-fed redheads crouched at your peatfires:
Ancestors of this English I think in, my measure.
Christianized man-killers, makers of poems—”
― Robert Pinksy

“Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.
What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.”
― Richard Wilbur