J.R. Tompkins > J.R.'s Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 51

« previous 1 2 next »

#1

“When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

21 likes

#2

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism

46416 likes

#3

“She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers

tags: foster-children, friendship, love, parenting

2 likes

#4

“When asked about rewriting, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that spontaneous eloquence seemed like a miracle and that he rewrote every word he ever published, and often several times. And Mark Strand, former poet laureate, says that each of his poems sometimes goes through forty to fifty drafts before it is finished.”
― Susan M. Tiberghien, One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer's Art and Craft

tags: rewriting, writing

8 likes

#5

“From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
― Groucho Marx

tags: books, humor, reading

3623 likes

#6

“Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of performance, are music. They have rhythm, and pitch, and timbre, and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us, and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't.”
― Aaron Sorkin

tags: meaning, music, performance, pitch, rhythm, script, timbre, volume, west-wing, words

0 likes

#7

“There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

105 likes

#8

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity”
― John Muir, Our National Parks

tags: hiking, mountains, nature, wilderness

1115 likes

#9

“If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

tags: dogs

89 likes

#10

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

tags: carpe-diem, education, inspirational, learning

77659 likes

#12

“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”
― John Adams, The Portable John Adams

tags: common-law, innocence, judicial, justice, law

281 likes

#13

“As time passed and Harry flew and flew and flew, he forgot all about the fog, the city below him, and just about everything. Nothing in the world seemed to matter but wings, and sky, and motion. The free and endless kind of motion that people are always looking for in a hundred different ways.

Flying was the way a swing swoops up; and the glide down a slide. It was the shoot of a sled downhill without the long climb back up. It was the very best throat-tightening thrills of skis, skates, surfboards and trampolines. Diving boards, merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels, .roller coasters, skate boards and soap-box coasters. It was all of them, one after the other, all at once and a thousand times over.”
― Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Black and Blue Magic

tags: flying

2 likes

#14

“What would it be like to feel so attached, so intrinsically bonded, so protective of one’s own best connection with time and the ages, of generations past and future, of another human life, of their time?”
― J.R. Tompkins, Price of the Child

tags: adoption, attachment-parenting, bonding, childhood, fatherhood, foster-children, protecting-kids

2 likes

#15

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. ... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights.”
― John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf

tags: beauty, death, ideas, inspirational, joy, life, victory, warped

235 likes

#16

“Great flocks of raindrops swelled and folded, and fell upon her like insects to a feast. She hadn’t thought to bring a raincoat; she was not well-prepared, and she hated that. Her mind seemed as stirred, dark and brooding, as the coffee-colored clouds.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

tags: brooding, clouds, ill-prepared, insects, insecurity, rain, raindrops

0 likes

#17

“There was something magical in his completely uninhibited amusement, something right in his utter abandon. It was a glow within him, as if he were translucent, at play with light itself. She somehow felt a peace with the world she had been missing before. She wondered if this was a glow Savio saw in his daughters. Antoníto stopped to look for her and sent up a big wave. This is joy, she thought.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

tags: bliss, childhood, contentment, glow, joy, light, magical-realism, parenthood, peacefulness, self-amusement

0 likes

#20

“She bent and placed a single daisy upon the grave. A simple white daisy. The plainest of flowers, perhaps the purest, Elspeth thought. It had cost next to nothing at all, and perhaps that was the point. She wasn’t being cheap. She was being symbolic. In her mind, Andrea deserved only the unstained purity of the simplest of daisies, a daisy that was unsoiled by a wealth that couldn’t find the money to have claimed her soul.”
― J.R. Tompkins

tags: cheap, childhood, daisy, death, grave, life, money, purity, simple, soul, symbolism, wealth

0 likes

#20

“When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time.”
― Maya Angelou

tags: oprah-s-thank-you-game, people

9359 likes

#21

“When you learn, teach, when you get, give.”
― Maya Angelou

1200 likes

#22

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
― Maya Angelou

4743 likes

#22

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

tags: angelou, meaning, words

945 likes

#23

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

24 likes

#23

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

tags: darkness, drive-out, hate, inspirational, light, love, peace

78204 likes

#24

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

tags: hero-s-journey

933 likes

#25

“God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!”
― Joseph Campbell

146 likes

#26

“The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”
― Bill Watterson

1635 likes

#27

“Antoníto clucked and clicked his arms in mimicry of a clock. When its human hands reached straight out, time stopped. There he lay absolutely still, a cruciform putto on sand angel wings, staring at a Michelangelo sky.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

tags: death-and-dying, passage-of-time, poetic-prose, putto, sand-angels, transcience

0 likes

#28

“Anyway, I think we coalesce out of the ether, acquiesce into droplets of god, grow upright from the earth, and become arrogant. We live our lives in blissful ignorance of where we come from, but ultimately we owe our selves back to the earth.”
― J.R. Tompkins, The Gardens of Marguerite

tags: arrogance, belonging, death, earth, ethereal, existence, god

0 likes