Eileen Lavery > Eileen's Quotes

“Empty Spaces

I wanted to feel less.
To not be burdened by emotion,
To not feel sadness,
To not know loss.
I envied the inanimate,
The trees that stand proudly in winter,
Not missing their leaves.
I wanted to be weightless,
To not experience limitation.
I didn’t want time to pass,
The blur of days, months, years.
It moved too quickly,
I wanted to grasp on,
Hold it.
It eluded me,
Intangible,
Like light.
I wanted to preserve life before you were gone.
I didn’t want to know grief.

But the pain kept me connected.
It meant that I loved you,
It meant that I would always be a little broken,
It meant that our love filled all of the empty spaces.
It meant that you would be with me... forever.”
― Jacqueline Simon Gunn

“There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die.”
― Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems

“The only surprising thing about miracles, however small, is that they sometimes happen.”
― Dylan Thomas, Quite Early One Morning

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
― Dylan Thomas, In Country Sleep, and Other Poems

“I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.”
― Dylan Thomas

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Make death proud to take us.”
― William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

“Aut viam inveniam aut faciam tibi.

I will either find a way or make one.”
― Kendall Ryan, Unravel Me

“I hate it
the way the heart
takes too long
to figure out what the mind
already knows”
― R.H. Sin, Whiskey, Words & a Shovel I

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson

“I used to imagine adventures for myself, I invented a life, so that I could at least exist somehow.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I've never been a coward at heart, although I've always been a coward in action”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“I like revisiting, at certain times, spots where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“I exist.’ In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I have so much to say to you that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I'm a master of speaking silently—all my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gentle Spirit

“I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear, I would be no longer alive.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena