Jesse Henderson > Jesse's Quotes

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#1

“Twilight fell: The sky turned to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

817 likes

#2

“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

tags: 129, sky, sunset

184 likes

#3

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

1745 likes

#4

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

tags: human-condition, humanity, life, nature, nurture, philosophy, roots

137 likes

#5

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: art, cybernetics, science

1805 likes

#6

“Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.”
― Jane Smiley, A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck

tags: horses, racing

48 likes

#7

“After five years I still had the impulse, every ten to twelve months, to find a new home. Spaces became too familiar, too elastic, too accommodating. Boredom and exasperation would set in. And though of course nothing really changed from one roof to another, I liked to harbor the illusion that small variations occurred within, that with each move something was being renewed.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds

tags: moving

33 likes

#8

“I hear there are people who actually enjoy moving. Sounds like a disease to me - they must be unstable. Though it does have it’s poetry, I’ll allow that. When an old dwelling starts looking desolate, a mixture of regret and anxiety comes over us and we feel like we are leaving a safe harbor for the rolling sea. As for the new place, it looks on us with alien eyes, it has nothing to say to us, it is cold.”
― Jan Neruda, Prague Tales

tags: moving

30 likes

#9

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: atheism, organized-religion, paradox, religion

2946 likes

#10

“No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.”
― Elizabeth Peters

tags: amelia-peabody, men, women

3779 likes

#11

“We need solitude, because when we're alone, we're free from obligations, we don't need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts.”
― Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story

tags: alone, alone-time, solitude

87 likes

#12

“I didn't know the cost
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

98 likes

#13

“Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

141 likes

#14

“Maybe in the next life we'll meet each other for the first time- believing in everything but the harm we're capable of. Maybe we'll be the opposite of buffaloes. We'll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple.

Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they're wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.

Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field- it was always there- where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

As a rule, be more.

As a rule, I miss you.

As a rule,"little" is always smaller than "small". Don't ask me why.

I'm sorry I don't call enough.

Green Apple.

I'm sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

tags: buffaloes, rules, survival

169 likes

#15

“The Mistake

With the mistake your life goes in reverse.
Now you can see exactly what you did
Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before
And each mistake leads back to something worse

And every nuance of your hypocrisy
Towards yourself, and every excuse
Stands solidly on the perspective lines
And there is perfect visibility.

What an enlightenment. The colonnade
Rolls past on either side. You needn't move.
The statues of your errors brush your sleeve.
You watch the tale turn back — and you're dismayed.

And this dismay at this, this big mistake
Is made worse by the sight of all those who
Knew all along where these mistakes would lead —
Those frozen friends who watched the crisis break.

Why didn't they say? Oh, but they did indeed —
Said with a murmur when the time was wrong
Or by a mild refusal to assent
Or told you plainly but you would not heed.

Yes, you can hear them now. It hurts. It's worse
Than any sneer from any enemy.
Take this dismay. Lay claim to this mistake.
Look straight along the lines of this reverse.”
― James Fenton, Out of Danger

tags: acceptance, hindsight, mistakes

60 likes

#16

“I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

tags: hindsight, infatuation, love, real

27 likes

#17

“It was clear to me that it wouldn't matter what I did - they would never truly appreciate me or learn what I had to offer. They were far beyond fickle - they were insensible, like kittens,predatory little things, distracted by the first bit of string or shiny bauble that rolled across the floor, and nothing I could ever say or do could possibly make any kind of dent in their willful ignorance.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Dexter Is Delicious

tags: children, defeat, dexter, fickle, ignorance, teaching-insensible

17 likes

#18

“I want to learn how to speak to anyone at any time and make us both feel a little bit better, lighter, richer, with no commitments of ever meeting again. I want to learn how to stand wherever with whoever and still feel stable. I want to learn how to unlock the locks to our minds, my mind, so that when I hear opinions or views that don’t match up with mine, I can still listen and understand. I want to burn up lifeless habits of following maps and to-do lists, concentrated liquids to burn my mind and throat
and I want to go back to the way nature shaped me. I want to learn to go on well with whatever I have in my hands at the moment
in a natural state of mind,
certain like the sea.

I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

tags: become, becoming-better, better, certain, charlotte-eriksson, comfort, commitment, develop, friends, friendship, growing, learn, love, map, meeting, mind, nature, ocean, opinions, rhythm, richer, sea, self-development, songwriter, speak, state-of-mind, the-glass-child, view, writer, young, youth

138 likes

#19

“I don’t care to be pretty,” Blue shot back hotly, “I care to look on the outside like I look on the inside.”
― Maggie Stiefvater

tags: beauty, blue

18 likes

#20

“It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.”
― Markus Zusak, Underdog

tags: black, bleeding, blue, dark, day, dying, mornig, stars, time

73 likes

#21

“The night stayed outside. She was surprised. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Instead, blue things flew in, pieces of glass or tin, or necklaces of blue diamond, perhaps. The air was the blue of a pool when there are shadows, when clouds cross the turquoise surface, when you suspect something contagious is leaking, something camouflaged and disrupted. There is only this infected blue enormity, elongating defiantly. The blue that knows you and where you live and it's never going to forget.”
― Kate Braverman

tags: blue, water

10 likes

#22

“The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't.”
― Christopher Paolini, Eragon

tags: nature, ocean

1203 likes

#23

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

tags: empathy, friends, friendship, inspirational

14188 likes

#24

“People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures. Then you find yourself focusing on the new ones, not the ones from the past.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Rescue

tags: friends, life

3020 likes

#25

“When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”
― Fred Rogers

tags: friends, friendship, love, peace

2819 likes

#26

“It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

tags: compassion, enemies, friends, friendship, religion

1118 likes

#27

“It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed.

("The Wendigo")”
― Algernon Blackwood, Monster Mix

tags: experience, explanation, explanations

25 likes

#28

“When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”
― David Lynch

tags: art, explanation, language, translation, words

9 likes

#29

“Can you explain away love too?' I asked.
'Oh yes,' he said. 'The desire to possess in some, like avarice: in others the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won't be bored. The desire to find again a father or a mother. And of course under it all the biological motive.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

tags: definition-of-love, explanation, love

20 likes