Madison > Madison's Quotes

“Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.”
― Josephine Winslow Johnson, Now in November

“You will hear thunder and remember me,
and think: she wanted storms...”
― Anna Akhmatova

“A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls.”
― Walt Whitman

“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
― Anne Frank

“I bid the chords sweet music make,
And all must follow in my wake.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back”
― Lucille Clifton

“Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”
― Gilda Radner

“You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
― George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”
― O. Henry

“When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.”
― Margaret Walker

“Should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money - I think that can be a burden - I’m greedy for an exciting life.”
― David Hockney

“The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

“In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.”
― Tony Kushner, Perestroika

“A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”
― Phyllis Diller

“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.”
― Alice Munro

“Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.”
― Alice Munro

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
― Alice Munro, Selected Stories

“Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her

“Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?”
― Alice Munro

“This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all.

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.

This is what happens.

...

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”
― Alice Munro, Runaway: Stories

“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.”
― Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose

“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.”
― Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

“He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life. ”
― Alice Munro, Away from Her

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro