Laura > Laura's Quotes

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I'm battling monsters, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings/ and you say I'll give you anything but you never come through.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”
― Raymond Carver

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

“two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

“You go your way
I'll go your way too”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

“It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender”
― Leonard Cohen

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
― Gary Snyder

“stay together
learn the flowers
go light”
― Gary Snyder

“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder

“Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being.   To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“... there's the fact of her being a hundred and four years old. I keep saying that's her age, but actually I'm just guessing. We don't really know for sure how old she is, and she claims she doesn't remember, either. When you ask her, she says,

"Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne."


.... (footnote) Zuibun nagaku ikasarete itadaite orimasu ne -- "I have been alive for a very long time, haven't I?" Totally impossible to translate, but the nuance is something like: "I have been caused to live by the deep conditions of the universe to which I am humbly and deeply grateful. P. Arai calls it the "gratitude tense," and says the beauty of this grammatical construction is that "there is no finger pointed to a source." She also says, "It is impossible to feel angry when using this tense.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others...Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.”
― Rumi

“My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I love you to pieces, distraction, etc.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“We're all just walking each other home.”
― Ram Dass

“Your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness.”
― ram dass

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life--your success--depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there...”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency