stephanie roberts > stephanie's Quotes

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“They're only crayons. You didn't fear them in Kindergarten, why fear them now?”
― Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.”
― Stephanie Roberts

“You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”
― Nelson Algren, Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

“Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else.”
― Stephanie Roberts, As We Are

“Why not laugh again, and let your joy be my monument?”
― Stephanie Roberts, As We Are

“Failing and Flying"

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“I am protective of the gentle slope of stomach bulging like an early pregnancy, at my waist. I've earned its existence with everything I've been forced to swallow.”
― Stephanie Roberts

“And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.”
― Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“I feel such a creative force in me: I am convinced that there will be a time when, let us say, I will make something good every day , on a regular basis....I am doing my very best to make every effort because I am longing so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things mean painstaking work, disappointment, and perseverance.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“You fill a hungry place shaped like your darkness.”
― Stephanie Roberts

“Nostalgia is best cured via horse whipping.”
― Stephanie Roberts

“Maybe I should just lie quietly inside you while our old selves slip in and out of the back rooms of the soul.”
― Richard Jackson

“We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring to its knees like a traitor.”
― Richard Jackson

“She could see it surprised him, too, sometimes. He told her once when there was a storm a bird had flown into the house. He’d never seen one like it. The wind must have carried it in from some far-off place. He opened all the doors and windows, but it was so desperate to escape that for a while it couldn’t find a way out. “It left a blessing in the house,” he said. “The wildness of it. Bringing the wind inside.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Lila

“He looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn't even know he wanted, and here it was.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Lila

“It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you'd never stop missing it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Lila

“Love is divine only and difficult always.”
― Toni Morrison, Paradise

“Sleep without the fragrance of her hair next to him was impossible.”
― Toni Morrison

“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“He wants to put his story next to hers.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own.”
― Toni Morrison

“The best thing she was, was her children.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved