Minnie > Minnie's Quotes

“The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.”
― Robert Frost

“intuition is always right in at least two important ways;
It is always in response to something.
it always has your best interest at heart”
― Gavin De Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“It was a cold blustery day when he walked out of the courthouse for the last time. He walked down the steps and out the back door and got in his truck and sat there. He couldnt name the feeling. It was sadness but it was something else besides. And the something else besides was what had him sitting there instead of starting the truck. He'd felt like this before but not in a long time and when he said that, then he knew what it was. It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death. You need to get over that, he said. Then he started the truck.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?”
― Somerset Maugham

“For the sadness in legitimate humour consists in the fact that honestly and without deceit it reflects in a purely human way upon what it is to be a child.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Love at first sight'some say misnaming
Discovery of twinned helplessness
Against the huge tug of procreation.

But friendship at first sight? This also
Catches fiercely at the surprised heart
So that the cheek blanches then blushes.”
― Robert Graves

“Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary


Somewhere up in the eaves it began:
high in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and the gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast –
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it –
spilled down on the path below.
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures.”
― Eavan Boland

“If you no longer live,
if you my beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain in my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death
and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you
are sleeping, but
I shall live”
― Pablo Neruda

“All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
And your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
Walk mindfully, well-loved one,
Walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
Be always coming home.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane

“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
― H.L. Mencken

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Future Perfect

Where you were
before you were born,
and where you are
when you're not anymore
might be very close.
Might be the same place,
though neither is
as slippery
as being here but
imagining where
you will have been-
that point
where things land,
are finished, over, and
gone but not yet.”
― Lia Purpura