Maria Ejike > Maria's Quotes

“I have lived a long time," she said. "And the longer I live, the more it surprises me, and saddens me, how wise the young must become to live in this world.”
― Simon Jimenez, The Spear Cuts Through Water

“If only there were a way to hold a moment in your hands and keep it alive forever.”
― Simon Jimenez, The Spear Cuts Through Water

“This is a love story to its blade-dented bone.”
― Simon Jimenez, The Spear Cuts Through Water

“They fought for nothing, which is why you see yourself in them.”
― Simon Jimenez, The Spear Cuts Through Water

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Oh quickly disappearing photograph
in my more slowly disappearing hand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Collected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything;”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke

“IN APRIL Again the woods are odorous, the lark Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. After long rainy afternoons an hour Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings Them at the windows in a radiant shower, And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; And cradled in the branches, hidden deep In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems

“and also I am the leaves and the blossoms, and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“Sometimes

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime
melancholy leaves me breathless…

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Mary Oliver, Red Bird (Beacon Press, 2008)”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“When I think of death
it is a bright enough city,”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“and easily
she adored

every blossom,

not in the serious,
careful way
that we choose
this blossom or that blossom—

the way we praise or don’t praise—
the way we love
or don’t love—
but the way

we long to be—
that happy
in the heaven of earth—
that wild, that loving.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.

And live
your life.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.”
― Mary Oliver, Red Bird

“Why were children the only ones who ever got to melt down?”
― Yūko Tsushima, Territory of Light

“But my daughter, not minding, scampered off towards the pond. I ran after her, out of breath. A weeping willow stood at the point where the side path joined the main one. As it caught the rays of the sinking sun full on, its brightness was dazzling to eyes grown accustomed to the shadows. My daughter was jumping up and down, trying to grab one of the willow’s dangling branches. All right, I would wow her by grabbing a whole bunch. Shading my eyes with one hand, I approached my daughter in the light.”
― Yūko Tsushima, Territory of Light

“No deberíamos haber crecido. Si hubiéramos sabido que ser un adulto es tan aburrido, habríamos jugado mucho más de pequeñas.”
― Yūko Tsushima, Territorio de luz