Lydia > Lydia's Quotes

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.”
― John Ashbery

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
― John Steinbeck

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
― Carl Sandburg

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The whole world is covered in buttons, and not one of them is mine!”
― Arnold Lobel

“At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, ‘Come down to the water.’ It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look, I see fire: that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flourish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible present and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollins pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers’ barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not?”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Angry people are not always wise.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“We would lie on coral sand, below sugary stars,
watching Cassiopeia mount her throne
and the Great Bear wash its paws in the South.
I would say, "I have a secret to tell you."
And, folding me in your arms, boyish and sly,
you would answer: "Whisper it into my mouth.

”
― Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems

“Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?”
― Diane Ackerman

“Lay me down like a stone oh God, and raise me up like a new bread".”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“The best way out is always through.”
― Robert Frost

“Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”
― George Bernard Shaw