Alison > Alison's Quotes

“may i be i is the only prayer--not may i be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong



today... may i be me....five foot eleven, brown hair/eyed, smart, serious, happy, frustrated, impatient, joyful, running, sleeping, smiling, eating, trying, believing, listening, being & becoming.”
― -e.e. cummings

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
― E.E. Cummings

“You are tired,
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.

Come with me, then,
And we’ll leave it far and far away—
(Only you and I, understand!)

You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows,
And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me!
I’ll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,
That floats forever and a day;
I’ll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,
Until I find the Only Flower,
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.”
― E.E. Cummings

“How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“For all eternity, I forgive you and you forgive me.”
― William Blake

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“We were all very friendly but we were like 4 monarchs each doing their own thing.”
― Emily Dickenson

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The lovely flowers
embarrass me.
They make me regret
I am not a bee...”
― Emily Dickinson

“I felt it shelter to speak to you.”
― Emily Dickinson

“A great hope fell
You heard no noise
The ruin was within.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“They might not need me; but they might.
I'll let my head be just in sight;
A smile as small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity.”
― Emily Dickenson

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
― Emily Dickinson

“An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear,
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.”
― Emily Dickinson

“A wounded dear leaps the highest”
― Emily Dickinson

“If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the summer by,
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“I tasted life.”
― Emily Dickenson

“If I can stop one Heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can Ease one life the Aching,
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.”
― Emily Dickinson

“There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.”
― Emily Dickinson

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“My friends are my estate.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I'll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.
The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
"That must have been the sun!”
― Emily Dickinson

“I am nobody! Who are you? Are you a nobody, too?”
― Emily Dickinson

“To be alive──is Power.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“The sun just touched the morning;
The morning, happy thing,
Supposed that he had come to dwell,
And life would be all spring.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

“your brain is wider than the sky”
― Emily Dickinson

“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”
― Emily Dickinson