Cassandra > Cassandra's Quotes

“This is an ode to all of those that have never asked for one.
A thank you in words to all of those that do not do
what they do so well for the thanking.
This is to the mothers.
This is to the ones who match our first scream
with their loudest scream; who harmonize in our shared pain
and joy and terrified wonder when life begins.
This is to the mothers.
To the ones who stay up late and wake up early and always know
the distance between their soft humming song and our tired ears.
To the lips that find their way to our foreheads and know,
somehow always know, if too much heat is living in our skin.
To the hands that spread the jam on the bread and the mesmerizing
patient removal of the crust we just cannot stomach.
This is to the mothers.
To the ones who shout the loudest and fight the hardest and sacrifice
the most to keep the smiles glued to our faces and the magic
spinning through our days. To the pride they have for us
that cannot fit inside after all they have endured.
To the leaking of it out their eyes and onto the backs of their
hands, to the trails of makeup left behind as they smile
through those tears and somehow always manage a laugh.
This is to the patience and perseverance and unyielding promise
that at any moment they would give up their lives to protect ours.
This is to the mothers.
To the single mom’s working four jobs to put the cheese in the mac
and the apple back into the juice so their children, like birds in
a nest, can find food in their mouths and pillows under their heads.
To the dreams put on hold and the complete and total rearrangement
of all priority. This is to the stay-at-home moms and those that
find the energy to go to work every day; to the widows and the
happily married.
To the young mothers and those that deal with the unexpected
announcement of a new arrival far later than they ever anticipated.
This is to the mothers.
This is to the sack lunches and sleepover parties, to the soccer games
and oranges slices at halftime. This is to the hot chocolate
after snowy walks and the arguing with the umpire
at the little league game. To the frosting ofbirthday cakes
and the candles that are always lit on time; to the Easter egg hunts,
the slip-n-slides and the iced tea on summer days.
This is to the ones that show us the way to finding our own way.
To the cutting of the cord, quite literally the first time
and even more painfully and metaphorically the second time around.
To the mothers who become grandmothers and great-grandmothers
and if time is gentle enough, live to see the children of their children
have children of their own. To the love.
My goodness to the love that never stops and comes from somewhere
only mothers have seen and know the secret location of.
To the love that grows stronger as their hands grow weaker
and the spread of jam becomes slower and the Easter eggs get easier
to find and sack lunches no longer need making.
This is to the way the tears look falling from the smile lines
around their eyes and the mascara that just might always be
smeared with the remains of their pride for all they have created.
This is to the mothers.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“I would rather hurt,
and walk through the flames you leave,
than never feel you.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“Come here
and take off your clothes
and with them
every single worry
you have ever carried.
My fingertips on your back
will be the very last thing
you will feel
before sleeping
and the sound of my smile
will be the alarm clock
to your morning ears.
Come here
and take off your clothes
and with them
the weight of every yesterday
that snuck atop your shoulders
and declared them home.
My whispers will be the soundtrack
to your secret dreams
and my hand
the anchor to the life
you will open your eyes to.
Come here
and take off your clothes.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“I am yours
and I will whisper it
and shout it
and write it
and carve it into my skin
if only blood
would tell you
the truth you need to see.
I am yours
and I have never
been anyone's before.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“Because of you I can feel myself slowly but surely becoming the me I have always dreamed of being.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“Look deeper through the telescope
and do not be afraid when the stars
collide towards the darkness,
because sometimes the most beautiful
things begin in chaos.”
― Robert M. Drake

“How could I live above the water or breathe under it. How could I swim in darkness consumed in an ocean of you? Falling or flying towards you, losing or finding myself in you and beauty was never the word to catch all that you are. For now I know the means of the infinite and it all starts and ends with you.”
― robert m drake

“Impossibility

Do you know the feeling when you’re so happy that you can’t imagine ever being sad again? Or when you’re so sad that you no longer believe you could ever be happy? When you tell me you love me, I always think of that strange emotion—that feeling of impossibility. You say you love me, and you can’t imagine a future without me in it, yet all I can think of is how you must have felt the same way once about someone else.”
― Lang Leav, The Universe of Us (Volume 4)

“I believe
in love at first sight
but I will always believe
that the people
we love
we have loved before.
Many, many, many times before
and when we stumble
through grace and circumstance
and that brilliant illusion of choice
to finally meet them again,
we feel it faster
each time through.
The one glance
that set life alight
is two sets of two eyes
staring through the layers
of lifetimes and stolen glances
and first kisses and hands held;
the brace against the weight
and unrelenting tide
of waiting.
I believe
in love at first sight
but am not burdened with the misconception
that it's a first sight
at all.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson

“Fall in love with someone
who tastes like adventure
but looks like
the calm, beautiful morning
after a terrible storm”
― Nikita Gill

“The thing I admire most
about you
is no matter how hard,
or how much the world
has tried to
beat you,
break you,
destroy you,
and throw you to the wolves
you are still here,
turning all your pain
all your suffering
into armor,
into determination,
into weapons
and earning the respect
of that same pack of wolves
that were meant to rip you
limb from limb.”
― Nikita Gill, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty

“The Sun and the Moon

Aim for a love
that reminds you
of the devotion
the sun has to the moon.
Whether she is in fractions
or she is whole,
he still shrouds his intense light
in the darkness of the night.
To give her the entire sky,
without judgment,
so she can shine in any way she wants to.
You deserve someone
who adores you
on the days you are
in broken fragments too.
You deserve someone
who lets you glow
in every way
you need to.”
― Nikita Gill, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty

“Knowledge after all is a dark art, full to the brim with liberty, a trembling, malleable power.”
― Nikita Gill, Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place”
― Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You

“The conversation between your fingers and someone else’s skin. This is the most important discussion you can ever have.”
― Iain Thomas

“If I breathe you in and you breathe me out, I swear we can breathe forever. I swear I’ll find summer in your winter and spring in your autumn and always, hands at the ends of your fingers, arms at the ends of your shoulders and I swear, when we run out of forever, when we run out of air, your name will be the last word that my lungs make air for.”
― Iain Thomas

“Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends.

Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was.

Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill.

Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia.

Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him.

Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor.

And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give them a chance.”
― Iain Thomas

“Let someone love you just the way you are—as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.”
― Iain S. Thomas

“And he loves her. He loves her like he can never grab enough of her between his fingers”
― Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“In October 2004, seven Milwaukee police officers sadistically beat Frank Jude Jr. outside an off-duty police party. The Journal Sentinel newspaper in Milwaukee investigated the crime and published photos of Jude taken right after the beating. The officers were convicted, and some reforms were put in place. But the city saw an unexpected side effect. Calls to 911 dropped dramatically—twenty-two thousand less than the previous year. You know what did rise? The number of homicides—eighty-seven in the six months after the photos were published, a seven-year high. That information comes from a 2016 study done by Matthew Desmond, an associate social sciences professor at Harvard University and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted. He told the Journal Sentinel that a case like Jude’s “tears the fabric apart so deeply and delegitimizes the criminal justice system in the eyes of the African-American community that they stop relying on it in significant numbers.” With shootings of unarmed civilians being captured on cell phones and shared on the internet, the distrust of the police is not relegated to that local community. The stories of the high-profile wrongful death cases of Tamir Rice in Cleveland or Eric Brown in New York spread fast across the country. We were in a worse place than we were twenty years earlier, when the vicious police officer beating of Rodney King went unpunished and Los Angeles went up in flames. It meant more and more crimes would go unsolved because the police were just not trusted. Why risk your life telling an organization about a crime when you think that members of that organization are out to get you? And how can that ever change?”
― Billy Jensen, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Invisible things are the only realities.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Loss of Breath

“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetic Principle