Sarah Maier > Sarah's Quotes

“Where to now? Only the previously unknowable and unspoken will bring us there.”
― Kazim Ali, Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire

“One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”
― John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little

“A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven't quite found the words.”
― Jim Harrison

“But these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel 'I shall never know'.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“She couldn't know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn't be anyone, but she could still love.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, explicable, or unapproachable. It is all of these things.”
― Peter Høeg, Borderliners

“Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Ghosts and Other Lectures

“It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination

“Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

“Thus, in time, it became painful to love. Hate would have been mercy then.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination

“To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination

“The universe no longer seems to me a scene, at least in front of the great, blank curtain of the unknowable, filled by an orderly progress of more or less cognizable and predictable occurrences, depending upon interrelated causes; it seems the playground of the irresponsible, prankish, malevolent somethings, productive of incalculabilities.”
― Edward Lucas White, The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Living alone,' November whispered, 'is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“... relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“But love is love, and love is compulsion. I must, and I do.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“She was ... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“Things that begin and end in grief: marriage, harvest, childbirth. Journeys away from home. Journeys toward home. Surgeries. Love. Weeping.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from innocence to inkling to knowledge to the inevitable apotheosis of desperation.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“A folktale in Hokkaido just after the war and passed from conductor to conductor held that the floor of heaven is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. The trains that ran along them were fabulous even by the Shinkansen of today: carriages containing whole pine forests hung with gold lanterns, carriages full of rice terraces, carriages lined in red silk where the meal service bought soup, rice-balls, and a neat lump of opium with persimmon tea poured over it in the most delicate of cups. These trains sped past each other, utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutched the branches like leather handholds, and plucked the green rice to eat raw, amd fell back insensate into the laps of women whose faces were painted red from brow to chin. They never stop, never slow, and only with great courage and grace could a spirit slowly progress from car to car, all the way to the conductor's cabin, where all accounts cease, and no man knows what lies therein.
In Hokkaido, where the snow and the ice are so white and pure they glow blue, it is said only the highest engineers of Japan Railways know the layout of the railroads on the floor of heaven. They say that these exalted engineers are working slowly, generation by generation, to lay the tracks to earth so that they mirror exactly the tracks in heaven. When this is done, those marvelous carriages will fall from the sky, and we may know on earth, without paying the terrible fare of death, the gaze of the red women, the light of the forest lanterns, and the taste of persimmon tea.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet