Pri > Pri's Quotes

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
― Emily Dickinson

“This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me”
― Emily Dickinson

“Our heads are round so thought can change direction”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
― John Keats

“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
― Frederick Douglass

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
― William Blake

“A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.”
― John Donne, The Complete English Poems

“Here lies a she sun, and a he moon there;
She gives the best light to his sphere;
Or each is both, and all, and so
They unto one another nothing owe;
And yet they do, but are
So just and rich in that coin which they pay,
That neither would, nor needs forbear, nor stay;
Neither desires to be spared nor to spare.
They quickly pay their debt, and then
Take no acquittances, but pay again;
They pay, they give, they lend, and so let fall
No such occasion to be liberal.
More truth, more courage in these two do shine,
Than all thy turtles have and sparrows, Valentine.”
― John Donne, The Complete English Poems

“Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“It would be, like all of Pammy's parties, hot and crowded and filled with impossibly glamorous people with hip bones so sharp they could qualify as concealed weapons.”
― Lauren Willig, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“It was a question I had worn on my lips for days - like a loose thread on my favourite sweater I couldn't resist pulling - despite knowing it could all unravel around me.

"Do you love me?" I ask.

In your hesitation I found my answer.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“In her eyes, the sadness sings—of one who was destined, for better things.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“What was it like to lose him?" Asked Sorrow.
There was a long pause before I responded:

It was like hearing every goodbye ever said to
me—said all at once.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“Do you know what it is like,
to lie in bed awake;
with thoughts to haunt
you every night,
of all your past mistakes.

Knowing sleep will set it right -
if you were not to wake.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“I don't think all writers are sad, she said.
I think it's the other way around—
all sad people write.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“A Stranger

There is a love I reminisce,
Like a seed
I've never sown.

Or lips that im yet to kiss,
and eyes
not met my own.

Hands that wrap around my wrists,
and arms
that feel like home.

I wonder how it is I miss,
these things
I've never known.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“The Wanderer

What is she like?
I was told—
she is a
melancholy soul.

She is like
the sun to the night;
a momentary gold.

A star when dimmed
by dawning light;
the flicker of
a candle blown.

A lonely kite
lost in flight—
someone once
had flown.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“Sad Songs

Once there was a boy who couldn't speak but owned a music box that held every song in all the world. One day he met a girl who had never heard a single melody in her entire life and so he played her his favorite song. He watched while her face lit up with wonder as the music filled the sky and the poetry of lyrics moved her in a way she had never felt before.

He would play his songs for her day after day and she would sit by him quietly—never seeming to mind that he could only speak to her through song. She loved everything he played for her, but of them all—she loved the sad songs best. So he began to play them more and more until eventually, sad songs were all she would hear.

One day, he noticed it had been a very long time since her last smile. When he asked her why, she took both his hands in hers and kissed them warmly. She thanked him for his gift of music and poetry but above all else—for showing her sadness because she had known neither of these things before him. But it was now time for her to go away—to find someone who could show her what happiness was.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Do you remember the song that was playing the night we met?

No, but I remember every song I have heard since you left.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“The scatterbrain,
is a little like,
the patter of rain.

Neither here,
nor there,
but everywhere.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“Someday in our future it may be possible for women everywhere not to be restricted to those roles society deems natural, God-given, or appropriately feminine. A woman will not need to be disguised as a man to go outside, to climb a tree, or to make money. She will not need to make an effort to resemble a man, or to think like one. Instead, she can speak a language that men will want to understand. She will be free to wear a suit or a skirt or something entirely different. She will not count as three-quarters of a man, and her testimony will not be worth half a man's. She will be recognized as someone's sister, mother, and daughter. And maybe, someday, her identity will not be confined to how she relates to a brother, a son, or a father. Instead, she will be recognized as an individual, whose life holds value only in itself.”
― Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan

“The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency. The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James Baldwin