Rachel > Rachel's Quotes

“Sorrow carves the cup that holds my joy.”
― Chinese unknown

“Lords are gold and knights steel, but two links can't make a chain. You also need silver and iron and lead, tin and copper and bronze and all the rest, and those are farmers and smiths and merchants and the like. A chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
― Bruce Lee

“Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.”
― John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir

“We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.”
― Helene Cixous

“She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.”
― Roman Payne

“I saw the angel in the marble and I chiseled until I set it free. —Michelangelo”
― John G. Miller, QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“I was born upon the prairie where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, not within walls.”
― Ten Bears Comanche Nation

“Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.”
― John Berger

“May I a small house and large garden have;
And a few friends,
And many books, both true.”
― Abraham Cowley

“Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To country people Cows are mild,
And flee from any stick they throw;
But I’m a timid town bred child,
And all the cattle seem to know.”
― T. S. Eliot

“After all," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

“Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“I love you more than there are stars in the sky and fish in the sea.”
― Nicholas Sparks

“Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.”
― Steven Wright

“Here," an old sugar worker told me, "the people have a great love for martyrs--but only after they're dead. Before, there's nothing but complaints.”
― Eduardo Hughes Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

“Now are the woods all black,
But still the sky is blue.”
― Marcel Proust , Swann’s Way

“Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?
Did you ever milk this kind of cow?
Well, we can do it. We know how.
If you never did, you should.
These things are fun and fun is good.”
― Dr. Seuss, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

“I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –
and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say
but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.

- Tea”
― Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture

“There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, pinhead eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light.”
― Dean Koontz, Innocence

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.”
― Albert Einstein

“Love weaves itself from hundreds of threads.”
― David Levithan

“That's the best you can hope for, Danny. That your life turns out like that patchwork quilt. That you can add some bright, sparkling pieces to the dirty, stained ones you've got so far. That in the end, the bright patches might take up more space on your quilt than the dark ones.”
― Brooke McKinley, Shades of Gray

“Faint heart never won fair maiden”
― Cervantes

“Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“Little Willie, full of glee,
Put radium in grandma's tea.
Now he thinks it quite a lark
To see her shining in the dark.”
― Harry Graham, Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes and More Ruthless Rhymes

“Next time you must stay for tea and we'll all sit together on a rock and sing a song to the moon”
― P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins: The Complete Collection