Meg Matheny > Meg's Quotes

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  • #1
    George Bernard Shaw
    “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
    George Bernard Shaw

  • #2
    Hafez
    “All happenings needed to be; accept that, my
    dear. Ask for any forgiveness one more time
    if you must,

    ask for forgiveness one more time if you must,
    then move on to your glory and sublime reign.”
    Hafez

  • #3
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
    Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  • #4
    Sylvia Plath
    “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

  • #5
    “Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed”
    Kristin Chang

  • #6
    Donna Tartt
    “There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
    Donna Tartt, The Secret History

  • #7
    Adrienne Rich
    “Power


    Living in the earth-deposits of our history

    Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
    one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
    cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
    for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

    Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
    she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
    her body bombarded for years by the element
    she had purified
    It seems she denied to the end
    the source of the cataracts on her eyes
    the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
    till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

    She died a famous woman denying
    her wounds
    denying
    her wounds came from the same source as her power. ”
    Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

  • #8
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
    Friedrich Nietzsche

  • #9
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you ca not be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed int he woods like timid deer!”
    Friedrich Nietzsche

  • #10
    Friedrich Nietzsche
    “And life confided the secret to me: behold, it said, l am that which must always overcome itself.”
    Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  • #11
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
    “Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
    because the mass man will mock it right away.
    I praise what is truly alive,
    what longs to be burned to death.

    In the calm water of the love-nights,
    where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
    a strange feeling comes over you,
    when you see the silent candle burning.

    Now you are no longer caught
    in the obsession with darkness,
    and a desire for higher love-making
    sweeps you upward.

    Distance does not make you falter.
    Now, arriving in magic, flying,
    and finally, insane for the light,
    you are the butterfly and you are gone.

    And so long as you haven't experienced
    this: to die and so to grow,
    you are only a troubled guest
    on the dark earth.”
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  • #12
    Joan Didion
    “...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #13
    Joan Didion
    “People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #14
    Joan Didion
    “[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #15
    Joan Didion
    “I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #16
    Joan Didion
    “It is the phenomenon somethings called "alienation from self." In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #17
    Joan Didion
    “It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying onceself Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" with one's head in a Food Fair bag.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #18
    Joan Didion
    “Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #19
    Joan Didion
    “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
    Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  • #20
    Federico García Lorca
    “Like a snake, my heart
    has shed its skin.
    I hold it here in my hand,
    full of honey and wounds.

    - New Heart
    Federico García Lorca

  • #21
    Federico García Lorca
    “To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
    Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

  • #22
    Federico García Lorca
    “To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”
    Federico García Lorca

  • #23
    Federico García Lorca
    “But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.”
    Federico Garcia Lorca

  • #24
    Sara Teasdale
    “I am the pool of gold
    When sunset burns and dies--
    You are my deepening skies;
    Give me your stars to hold”
    Sara Teasdale

  • #25
    Sara Teasdale
    Autumn Dusk

    I saw above a sea of hills
    A solitary planet shine,
    And there was no one, near or far,
    to keep the world from being mine.”
    Sara Teasdale, Dark of the Moon

  • #26
    Sara Teasdale
    “Love in my heart is a cry forever
    Lost as the swallow's flight,
    Seeking for you and never, never
    Stilled by the stars at night”
    Sara Teasdale

  • #27
    Sara Teasdale
    “Down the hill I went, and then,
    I forgot the ways of men,
    For night-scents, heady and damp and cool
    Wakened ecstasy ”
    Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow

  • #28
    Sara Teasdale
    “look for a lovely thing and you will find it, it is not far, it never will be far”
    Sara Teasdale

  • #29
    Mary Oliver
    “You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
    over and over announcing your place
    in the family of things.”
    Mary Oliver

  • #30
    Mary Oliver
    “to live in this world

    you must be able
    to do three things
    to love what is mortal;
    to hold it

    against your bones knowing
    your own life depends on it;
    and, when the time comes to let it go,
    to let it go”
    Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One



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