Bernadette > Bernadette's Quotes

“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

“Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.”
― Claire Keegan, Foster

“If I hope for anything as an artist, it’s that I inspire certain people to be who they really are. My audiences seem to be people who have been given a hard time for being who they are.”
― Sinead O'Connor, Rememberings

“My heart feels not so much in my chest as in my hands. I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside me.”
― Claire Keegan

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
― Helen Keller

“Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
― Mary Oliver

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“It was a sign of growing up, when the dark made no more difference to you than the day.”
― Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

“First we feel. Then we fall.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.”
― Mia Couto

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The truth doesn't care what we think of it.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“What we give cannot be taken from us.”
― Anne Michaels, Held

“In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“There were families everywhere, loose loud chains of them wandering down the streets, in and out of shops, young children with rings of ice-cream round their mouths and saddles of freckles across their noses.”
― Niall Williams, Four Letters of Love

“I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

“But what bothers me is that I only accidentally noticed them. What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been, so to speak, on the back porch, not the front porch? What would have been said to me that I failed to hear? What love might there have been that I didn't feel?”
― Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories