Synthia > Synthia's Quotes

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“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

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”
― Shel Silverstein

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
― Walt Whitman

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Let our scars fall in love.”
― Galway Kinnell

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes of the sky,
And you ask "What if I fall?"
Oh but my darling,
What if you fly?”
― Erin Hanson

“You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.”
― Maya Angelou

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
― Unsourced, misattributed to Maya Angelou

“Soft you day, be velvet soft,
My true love approaches,
Look you bright, you dusty sun,
Array your golden coaches.

Soft you wind, be soft as silk
My true love is speaking.
Hold you birds, your silver throats,
His golden voice I'm seeking.

Come you death, in haste, do come
My shroud of black be weaving,
Quiet my heart, be deathly quiet,
My true love is leaving.”
― Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems

“See you don't have to think about doing the right thing. If you're for the right thing you do it without thinking.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. ~ From intro to movie: "Spinning Into Butter”
― Maya Angelou

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

“The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”
― Mary Oliver

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

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi

“At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face against mine.
Breathe into me.
Close the language-door
and open the love-window.
The moon won't use the door,
only the window.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

“I am smiling at myself today
There's no wish left in this heart
Or perhaps there is no heart left
Free from all desire
I sit quietly like Earth
My silent cry echoes like thunder
Throughout the universe
I am not worried about it
I know it will be heard by no one
Except me.”
― Rumi

“Go back,
go back to sleep.

Yes, you are allowed.
You who have no Love in your heart,
you can go back to sleep.

The power of Love
is exclusive to us,
you can go back to sleep.

I have been burnt
by the fire of Love.
You who have no such yearning in your heart,
go back to sleep.

The path of Love,
has seventy-two folds and countless facets.
Your love and religion
is all about deceit, control and hypocrisy,
go back to sleep.

I have torn to pieces my robe of speech,
and have let go of the desire to converse.
You who are not naked yet,
you can go back to sleep.”
― Rumi, Hush, Don't Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems of Rumi

“Bring the pure wine of
love and freedom.
But sir, a tornado is coming.
More wine, we'll teach this storm
A thing or two about whirling.”
― Rumi

“Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.”
― Rumi

“We don’t say ‘I love you’
To those we really love.
Only to those we are deceiving
Or wish to console…”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”
― Pablo Neruda