jpiccs > jpiccs's Quotes

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The moment of change is the only poem.”
― Adrienne Rich

“And when they spy on us let them discover us loving”
― Alice Walker, Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.”
― Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

“...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Everything he has learned tells him to leave; Everything he has wished for tells him to stay.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we
imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“be strange to yourself
in your love, your grief”
― Brenda Shaughnessy, Our Andromeda

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“Sometimes when you read, it's like certain sentences strike home and knock you flat. It's as if they say everything you have tried to say, or tried to do, or everything you are. As a rule, what you are is one simmering, endless longing.”
― Gunnhild Øyehaug, Knots: Stories

“We need cats to need us. It unnerves us that they do not. However, if they do not need us, they nonetheless seem to love us.”
― Jeffery Masson

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.
”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--”
― Emily Dickinson

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
― Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

“Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.”
― Robin Sloan, Sourdough

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Power was the ability to reward and punish. Henry could reward with money and drugs. He could punish by withholding money and drugs. A nice combination. Ultimately, however, Henry wielded the power of punishment held only by a self-selected few. He was willing to murder. China knew that if a man could kill someone, everyone knew that he could kill anyone. The only way to stand up to that kind of power was to be willing to die.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas