Noah > Noah's Quotes

“I knew it!" He pumps a fist into the air. "You've fallen in love with me. You want to have my babies. We'll get a team of horses and a covered wagon and we'll journey to South America and raise goats.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“My dear Marwan,
in the long summers of childhood,
when I was a boy the age you are now,
your uncles and I
spread our mattress on the roof
of your grandfathers’ farmhouse
outside of Hom.

We woke in the mornings
to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze,
to the bleating of your grandmother's goat,
the clanking of her cooking pots,
the air cool and the sun
a pale rim of persimmon to the east.

We took you there when you were a toddler.

I have a sharply etched memory
of your mother from that trip.

I wish you hadn’t been so young.
You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse,
the soot of its stone walls,
the creek where your uncles and I built
a thousand boyhood dams.

I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan.

In its bustling Old City,
a mosque for us Muslims,
a church for our Christian neighbours,
and a grand souk for us all
to haggle over gold pendants and
fresh produce and bridal dresses.

I wish you remembered
the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh
and the evening walks we took
with your mother
around Clock Tower Square.

But that life, that time,
seems like a dream now,
even to me,
like some long-dissolved rumour.

First came the protests.
Then the siege.
The skies spitting bombs.
Starvation.
Burials.

These are the things you know

You know a bomb crater
can be made into a swimming hole.
You have learned
dark blood is better news
than bright.

You have learned that mothers and
sisters and classmates can be found
in narrow gaps between concrete,
bricks and exposed beams,
little patches of sunlit skin
shining in the dark.

Your mother is here tonight, Marwan,
with us, on this cold and moonlit beach,
among the crying babies and
the women worrying
in tongues we don’t speak.
Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and
Eritreans and Syrians.
All of us impatient for sunrise,
all of us in dread of it.
All of us in search of home.

I have heard it said we are the uninvited.
We are the unwelcome.
We should take our misfortune elsewhere.

But I hear your mother's voice,
over the tide,
and she whispers in my ear,
‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling.
Even half of what you have.
If only they saw.
They would say kinder things, surely.'

In the glow of this three-quarter moon,
my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy,
closed in guileless sleep.
I said to you,
‘Hold my hand.
Nothing bad will happen.'

These are only words.
A father's tricks.
It slays your father,
your faith in him.
Because all I can think tonight is
how deep the sea,
and how powerless I am to protect you from it.

Pray God steers the vessel true,
when the shores slip out of eyeshot
and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting,
easily swallowed.

Because you,
you are precious cargo, Marwan,
the most precious there ever was.

I pray the sea knows this.
Inshallah.

How I pray the sea knows this.”
― Khaled Hosseini, Sea Prayer

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
― John Muir

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul”
― John Muir

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”
― John Muir

“The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.”
― John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf: The American Naturalist's 1867 Journey Through the Post-War South

“Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”
― John Muir

“Going to the mountains is going home.”
― John Muir

“Going to the woods is going home.”
― John Muir

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Семейное счастие

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“Good things never last, bad things never die.”
― John Darnielle, Master of Reality

“When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.

- The Trouble With Reading”
― William Stafford

“I love you more than I love goats, and you know how I feel about goats", Gaby said.”
― James Patterson, The Christmas Wedding

“In the silence, I could hear the distinct sound of goats maa-ing in the barn. Lying there listening to them made me smile, too. I'd always loved goats - every one of them different from every other one, and all of them goofy and playful.”
― Steve Watkins, What Comes After

“There’s a saying in Hardorn,” she continued. “‘You shouldn’t attempt to teach a goat to sing. It will waste your time, hurt your ears, and annoy the goat.’ I can say without fear of contradiction that the goat is getting annoyed.”
― Mercedes Lackey, Exile's Honor

“Look carefully at the goat sitting on the edge of the cliff: Everything that shows you the peace of being fearless is a great teacher for you! That goat is a teacher for you, respect him!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“But...that doesn't make any sense...!'
'It does if you're a goat.”
― Linda Medley, Castle Waiting, Vol. 2

“From sunrise to sunset, I was in the forest, sometimes far from the house, with my goat who watched me as a mother does a child. All the animals in the forest became my friends, even dangerous and poisonous ones. Thanks to my goat-mother and my Indian nurse, I have always enjoyed the trust of animals--a precious gift. I still love animals infinitely more than human beings.”
― Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life

“I saw goats. A party can’t be all bad when you have goats,” Lucy said.”
― Mary Jane Hathaway, Persuasion, Captain Wentworth and Cracklin' Cornbread

“Goats' refusal of young blackbrush shoots, furthermore, is outright. They want nothing to do with it. Provenza pointed at his hand, then his arm and body, and said, "Every organ and every cell has receptors similar to what's in your nose and on your tongue." Creatures communicate within their environment the same way they communicate within their own bodies -- through chemical trigger substances that bind to receptors and produce responses. "It's all part of a feedback system," Provenza said, "that tells the body what's good and what isn't."

Goats are not stupid after all. They don't bumble through the world eating what they were born to like. They experience need states, satisfaction, and delight along with aversions to strong a mere hint of something can make them turn away in disgust. Flavor is what nutrition feels like to a goat.

If goats had a word for delicious, it would have two meanings. The first would be: I like this. The second would be: This is what my body needs. For goats, they are the same thing.”
― Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor

“Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.”
― Sue Grafton

“The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Normal is boring. Weird is better. Goats are awesome, but only in small quantities.”
― Jenny Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things

“Gideon laughed. "I like to be direct."
"Okay," I said. "But I warn you, I like to be evasive, inserutable and generally send mixed messages."
"I doubt it."
"Human interaction is not my strong point," I told him.
"Not seriously."
"Seriously," I said. Thinking: There is so much about me he doesn't know.
Gideon put his hand on my leg. "What's your strong point, then?"
"Goats," I told him. "I am excellent with goats.”
― E. Lockhart, Real Live Boyfriends: Yes. Boyfriends, Plural. If My Life Weren't Complicated, I Wouldn't Be Ruby Oliver

“This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.”
― Anton Chekhov