Milly > Milly's Quotes

“At lunchtime I bought a huge orange
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
This is peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all my jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist.”
― Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Even though I didn't have a clue of how to stop running myself ragged, to be still and know myself, or treat my body as one of those sanctuaries, I had my sacred spots. And in them, despite my utter ignorance of how to self-love, I knew that love existed.
That knowledge was the life raft that saved me from floating away into The Sea of Lost Causes.”
― Flea, Acid for the Children

“Whenever I’m at my darkest, I remember that there is goodness in the world. That there is pain and hardship and foolishness and misery, but that is what it is to be human. Now, whenever I get down, I remember that my life will pass in an instant, and I remember the value of the sacred, transient miracle of the heart beating in my chest, each moment impossibly precious, and that today, maybe today, Ponchik will pay me back my $600.”
― Liam Pieper, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year: A Memoir

“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”
― Jenny Slate

“While reading, all my confusion and hurt dissolved, and when I reentered reality, I was a little bit better of a person, a little more capable of learning from my missteps.”
― Flea, Acid for the Children

“Life is naught but a journey to achieve love.”
― Flea, Acid for the Children: A Memoir

“Tears are not a sad or happy thing, they mean you care. I’m a wimp who cries too, so be it.”
― Flea, Acid for the Children: A Memoir

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Love is low-stakes. Feelings matter, but don't hold all the power. We infuse them with importance but can deflate them if we need to. Instead of hurting because my feelings weren't reciprocated, I began to coach myself into feeling proud for having taken the risk.”
― Brodie Lancaster, No Way! Okay, Fine.

“I know the solution isn't to allow myself to trust everyone in the hope that my trust will be rewarded, just as the approach of treating all situations and people with caution isn't an effective one. There is no right answer. All I can do is listen to my gut, trust in my instincts, rely on my fear, wear comfortable shows and believe in women when they tell me what they know or have seen. That's all the hope we can have.”
― Brodie Lancaster, No Way! Okay, Fine.

“I tried to imagine what I might look like from a star's perspective: a tiny person in a grassy field in southern Utah, all by herself. She just stood there in her mismatched pajamas, looking up, so much happening in the world around her. But there she was, awake in the middle of the night, quietly staring away from it all, letting time slow down for a moment.”
― Abbi Jacobson, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

“The stars out there, out west, are different, they’re brighter and bolder, and they make you feel that the world is so much more than you ever could have thought, that maybe you’d only been focusing on a tiny little corner. I know all those stars are there too, in my New York sky, but I don’t see them. There’s too much in the way. This was the space I was longing for and had been seeking out. But I could see now I hadn’t been yearning for that expanse to escape into, but rather to remember that I was a part of it. Right, the universe. Right, the sky, the stars, the unfathomable mystery of those faraway galaxies. The original, intended purpose for the word awesome. How had I forgotten about all this? It’s all right here.”
― Abbi Jacobson, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“If something is not right or real, don't lose your self.”
― Lauren Child, Clarice Bean, Don't Look Now

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“family is a group of people thrown together by fate who become weirder and weirder until nobody else can understand them.”
― Liam Pieper, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year: A Memoir

“The turning points in life, the really important decisions, are rarely dramatic. The first time someone tries heroin isn’t life-altering, but the three-hundredth time, the time their heart stops, sure is. Every human is an unwieldy vessel, weighed down with hopes and dreams. We turn so slowly that we don’t even realise we are moving at all. We creatures of habit, our momentum is all-consuming. For every action there are consequences we could never anticipate; it’s how we grow, each of us, from worms into butterflies, flapping our wings and making tornadoes on the other side of the world.”
― Liam Pieper, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year: A Memoir

“We die alone, yes, but we are born alone too, so the people who enrich our lives are gifts, whether they are here for a lifetime or just a few moments. The trick is not to forget that.”
― Liam Pieper, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year: A Memoir

“If ever there was a spirit animal for the writer, it is the cat: vain, spoiled, disloyal, lazy but predatory; forever discontented, even if it looks to be purring; endlessly fascinating, to itself at least, and to those who go for that sort of thing.”
― Liam Pieper, Mistakes Were Made

“Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vitality.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

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

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
― 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

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple with a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves and satin sandles, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
and pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.”
― Jenny Joseph, Warning: When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

“Now that your worry has proved such an unlucrative business,
Why not find a better job?”
― Hafez, The Poetry Pharmacy Returns: More Prescriptions for Courage, Healing and Hope

“Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”
― Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984

“When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three
I was hardly me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five, I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.”
― A.A. Milne, Now We Are Six