Frank Delaere > Frank's Quotes

“Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
― W.S. Merwin

“From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.”
― Louise Gluck

“Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.”
― Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles

“My advice is, do not try to inhabit another's soul. You have your own.”
― Jim Harrison, Songs of Unreason

“When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks

“When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks

“I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems

“I see at least that all knowledge I wrung from the darkness-- that the darkness flung me-- is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing, the darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
― Randall Jarrell

“Truth always leaves a pleasure asking questions.”
― Allan Gurganus, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

“World is suddener than we fancy it.”
― Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems

“There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.”
― Robert Frost

“What counts is the question, of what is a body capable? And thereby he sets out one of the most fundamental questions in his whole philosophy (before him there had been Hobbes and others) by saying that the only question is that we don't even know [savons] what a body is capable of, we prattle on about the soul and the mind and we don't know what a body can do.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza

“C'est le destin de la ruse que de paraître trop simple à des savants trop naïfs”
― Gilles Deleuze

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― Wendell Berry

“It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
― wendell berry

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
― Robert Hass

“After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”
― Robert Hass

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“A kind of memory that tells us
that what we're now striving for was
once
nearer and truer and attached to us
with infinite tenderness. Here all is
distance,
there it was breath. After the first
home
the second one seems draughty and
strangely sexed.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

“Somewhere behind the athlete you've become and the hours of practice and the coaches who have pushed you is a little girl who fell in love with the game and never looked back... play for her.”
― Mia Hamm

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“But we didn’t, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn’t see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love—because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?—we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn’t, we didn’t, we never did.”
― Stuart Dybek

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“Death steals everything except our stories.”
― Jim Harrison, In Search of Small Gods

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”
― Maya Angelou

“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
― Francis Bacon, The Essays

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but
for the heart to conquer it.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore