Andrea > Andrea's Quotes

“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 had found a woman whom I had not known, and who from day to day had grown stranger to me, yet closer. Now she seemed to be slipping away from me again, into a realm where all names are forgotten, where there is only darkness and perhaps certain unknown laws of darkness. She rejected that dark realm; she came back, but she no longer
belonged to me as I had tried to believe. Perhaps she had never belonged to me; who, after all, belongs to whom, and what is it to belong to someone, to belong to one another? Isn't it a forlorn illusion, a convention? Time and again she turned back, as she called it, for an hour, for the duration of a glance, for a night. And always I felt like a bookkeeper who is not allowed to audit. I could only accept without question whatever this unaccountable, unhappy, damned, and beloved creature chose to be and to tell me. ... Loneliness demands a companion and does not ask who it is. If you don't know that, you may have been alone, but you were never lonely.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Night in Lisbon

“Intimacy could distort one's vantage, that much was true. Sometimes trying to see the whole of a person could be like describing a painting with your nose pressed to the canvas, though my husband would have argued that I hadn't wanted to see from a different angle, hadn't wanted to step back.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

“For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same”
― Mary Oliver

“But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.”
― Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

“I went to China,
I went to Prague;
I died, and was born in the spring;
I found you, and loved you, again.”
― Mary Oliver, White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems

“One learns by thinking about writing, and by talking
about writing-but primarily through writing.”
― Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
― Mary Oliver

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

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
― Mary Oliver

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― 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

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”
― Mary Oliver White Heron Rises Over Blackwater

“So every day
I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth
of the ideas of God,
one of which was you.”
― Mary Oliver

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

--from WHEN DEATH COMES”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“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.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. ”
― Mary Oliver

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them”
― Mary Oliver

“Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.”
― Mary Oliver

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.”
― Mary Oliver

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
― Jane Goodall

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
― Jane Goodall

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
― Jane Goodall

“Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.”
― Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe