Sommer > Sommer's Quotes

“The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the Equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I'd always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar - though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can, forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.”
― Danusha Laméris

“I am so small, a speck of dust moving across the huge world. The
world a speck of dust in the universe.

Are you holding the universe? You hold onto my smallness. How do you grasp it,
how does it not
slip away?

I know so little.


You have brought me so far.”
― Denise Levertov, The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes

“Hope is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.”
― Jericho Brown

“That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants