Roger Housden > Quotes

“All I know, lying in this bed or not lying here, is that this is the life that was given to me. The life that throbs along through any and all of my moments: this is it! If ever I wonder what my life was meant to look like, I have only to look around me. This, whatever I am doing or not doing, is what it is. This, right here, is as good as it gets! Your "one wild and precious life," as Mary Oliver says. And when you follow its movement, without trying to direct it with preconceived plans for the future, your life will lead you where you need to go. When you trust it, your body, rather than your mind, will walk you through the life you are meant to be living, whatever it may be.”
― Roger Housden, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

“When you die, God and the Angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.”
― Roger Housden, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

“But it happens, and I am thankful enough for that, for those fleeting, wakeful moments of beauty and truth. They are the real joy of being human, brief matches that flare in the dark.”
― Roger Housden, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

“The willingness to let go of what we know you might even call an expression of faith. Faith: not that things will work out as we hope, but faith, simply, in life and its extraordinary intelligence that never fails to surprise. While belief holds on tightly, faith lets go.”
― Roger Housden, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

“When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart

“That is what happens when the heart door opens- you become less yourself than part of everything.' Many are the sentinels who guard that door: our fears, our self-importance, our meanness, our greed, our bitterness, and others.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart

“Love, like everything else, exists in a spectrum. Love of another, love of the world, love of God, all these loves are really one love in different degrees of light and density.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart

“His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.”
― Roger Housden, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

“Layton once said that “a poet is deeply conflicted and it is in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. It doesn’t set the world in order, it doesn’t really change anything. It is just a kind of harbor, it’s the place of reconciliation, the kiss of peace.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“Faith, not belief, carries us forward; for a belief is a thought, whereas faith is a knowing, a certainty which grows in the marrow.”
― Roger Housden, For Lovers of God Everywhere

“The greatest gift and expression of love is the gesture of open arms - let come what comes - not because you don't care, or because you hope to steel yourself against pain, but because you care so much that you are helpless to do anything else.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“The heart, like the grape, is prone to delivering its harvest in the same moment that it appears to be crushed.”
― Roger Housden

“An honest goodbye is one that does not seek excuses or reasons, or explanations of any kind. Ultimately, it is not because of this or that that we part from a lover. Far from being an orderly linear progression, causes and effects form a complex web of interacting forces that together manifest in this or that result, which in its turn becomes part of the web and contributes to whatever comes next. The web itself is as broad and deep as the ocean. Behind every event, no matter how small, is a universe of causative factors stretching back through time as well as space. So let us rather bow to the fact and the mystery of what is before us, whatever it may be, and embrace its reality, regardless of its origins, without trying to control it by explaining it away.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“To say goodbye with all our heart is to turn a parting into a blessing.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“But the fullness of life escapes us either way, whether we are holding on or pushing away, I realize now, at this late hour. For at the heart of love is openness. An unfettered openness of heart and spirit, it seems to me, is what intimacy—with another and with all life—really means. That openness is what I now believe true detachment to be.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.”
― Roger Housden, Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation

“Orgasmic realizations will always be frowned upon by those who feel they have to keep up appearances.”
― Roger Housden, For Lovers of God Everywhere

“Of course! the path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.”
― Roger Housden, Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems

“great poetry reaches down into the depths of our humanity and captures the very essence of our experience.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“have also learned that a goodbye is an opportunity for kindness, for forgiveness, for intimacy, and ultimately for love and a deepening acceptance of life as it is instead of what it was or what we may have wanted it to be.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“Can we stand to gaze into the heart of our loss, the preciousness of what we are losing, and not look away?”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“Goodbye is derived from the phrase “God be with you.” A blessing is the offering of one heart to another; to another person, to a situation, to life itself. Isn’t that what we are here for? To bless the savor of this precious moment even as it slips through our fingers? To allow its sorrow, its joy, its silence or laughter to enter our life stream and add a measure to who we are? This is the spirit of these ten poems, and the hope of this book.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“You who were bewildered by a meaning, whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed—Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving. Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“Absence is a house so transparent that I, lifeless, will see you, living, and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye

“A sensibility like this makes us prone to wonder, to pondering questions rather than wanting comforting answers. It makes us prone to beauty, to experiences of being lifted beyond our usual sense of who we are into a larger, more inclusive life, which leads to love.”
― Roger Housden, Keeping the Faith Without a Religion

“Yet the whole point is not, in the end, a matter of succeeding or failing. It is a matter of putting one’s head on the chopping block of life and taking what comes. Of being willing to love even though love is bound to defeat us finally, if not through loss, if not through separation, then certainly in death.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Set You Free

“We have to say goodbye to everything eventually, and life is punctuated with a thousand goodbyes, some greater, some smaller, all along the way.”
― Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye