Calvin > Calvin's Quotes

“Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship... only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy vicitim to the charitible deceptions of nostalgia. ”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“El secreto de una buena vejez no es mas que un pacto honrado con la soledad.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cien Anos De Soledad/ One hundred Years of Solitude: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Compendios Vosgos

“Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!
L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux réjouies
Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!”
― Paul Valéry, Le cimetière marin / El cementerio marino

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”
― Confucius

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory