Shannon Polson > Shannon's Quotes

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
― Henry Thomas Buckle

“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Birds

“There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”
― Neil Gaiman

“He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us.”
― David Jones, In Parenthesis

“But how intolerable bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word.”
― David Jones, In Parenthesis

“...and how is a man to know the habits of their God, whether He smites suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of His people He is jealous of.”
― David Jones, In Parenthesis

“For they were unseasoned, nor inured, not knowing this to be much less than the beginning of sorrow.”
― David Jones, In Parenthesis

“They bright whiten all this sepulchre with powdered chloride of lime. It's a perfectly sanitary war.”
― David Jones, In Parenthesis

“As suddenly the whole world would slip back into a mollifying, untormented dark; their aching bodies knew its calm.”
― David Jones, In Parenthesis

“What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World

“Religious despair is often a defense against boredom and the daily grind of existence. Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that we are distant from God and then seek to make that distance into an intense experience. It is among the most difficult spiritual ailments to heal, because it is usually wholly illusory. There are definitely times when we must suffer God’s absence, when we are called to enter the dark night of the soul in order to pass into some new understanding of God, some deeper communion with him and with all creation. But this is very rare, and for the most part our dark nights of the soul are, in a way this is more pathetic than tragic, wishful thinking. God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. To feel him — to find him — does not usually require that we renounce all worldly possessions and enter a monastery, or give our lives over to some cause of social justice, or create some sort of sacred art, or begin spontaneously speaking in tongues. All to often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.
So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.
But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.
You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Horror shares an edge with hilarity.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson

“In this waiting, there is witness.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“The line between the living and the dead may not be much of a line at all, but the terrain is not for the weak of heart.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“Honoring a life is honoring the wide open space of wilderness and unknowing where the sacred dwells.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“Resurrection does not come without crucifixion, and you cannot celebrate Easter without living Good Friday.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“Tracks were adumbrations of the energy of life all about us, the recent history book of wilderness.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“Suffering is a jealous and lonely state. It can't abide the company of anything else. It is greedy; it demands all of one's energies.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“I wondered what those mountains behind them might tell me, what advice they would give, if they could talk. What they would tell me about love, and about loss, and about how this wild place could heal as naturally as it could kill.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“How is it that we are called to make the greatest journey of our lives at the time of least strength?”
― Shannon Huffman Polson

“Pain too much to handle also comes with exquisite beauty, as common as dirt, as unexpected as grace.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“Are we meant to be pilgrims of the depths?”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“There is no greater intimacy than sitting with someone traversing that tenuous boundary between worlds, sitting vigil with a spirit trembling on the border, reaching toward the new and releasing the old.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“What is known might sometimes sustain us, but what is unknown will save us.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey

“Grief would weave itself among the threads of love and life and hope, and I was starting to believe that what came of it all would still one day be beautiful.”
― Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey