Cindy > Cindy's Quotes

“Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“Paris is always a good idea.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
― May Sarton

“For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.”
― May Sarton

“I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
― J. Richard Lessor

“Now everyone dreams of a love faithful and true,
But you and I know what this world can do.
So let's make our steps clear so the other may see.
And I'll wait for you...should I fall behind wait for me.”
― Bruce Springsteen

“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. —Eleanor Roosevelt”
― Tal Ben-Shahar, Choose the Life You Want: The Mindful Way to Happiness

“oxygen

Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine

stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a

stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your

right shoulder which aches
all day. You are breathing
patiently; it is a

beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except

everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles

to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purest, sweet necessity: the air.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.”
― Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early

“Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another”
― D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia

“Messina between the volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, having known the death-agony's terror. I always dread coming near the awful place, yet I have found the people kind, almost feverishly so, as if they knew the awful need for kindness.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia

“The villagers and the farmers here tell the story of Demeter and Persephone with all the fresh wonder and anguish of a thing only just happened. They tell it in the same way they tell the story of Mary and Jesus. They believe the stories with equal fervor, resonant as they are of their own stories. Allegiance does not shift but only enlarges its endearment to hold both mothers—one with her crown of woven corn husks, the other shrouded in a rough woven veil. Why must we pray to only one? To us, they are the same. Le addolorate. Grieving women. In Sicily, the sacred and the profane are kin.”
― Marlena De Blasi, That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story

“Three Things to Remember

As long as you’re dancing, you can
break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.

Sometimes there are no rules.”
― Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings: Poems

“we put too much faith in G.D.P. as a metric.”
― Anonymous

“You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“But race is the child of racism, not the father.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“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

“Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God