Elisa > Elisa's Quotes

“Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.”
― Dawn Powell

“Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.”
― Dawn Powell

“The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.”
― Dawn Powell

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love,
Time is not.”
― Henry van Dyke, Music and Other Poems

“If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.”
― Pablo Neruda

“I knew I loved you before I met you
I think I dreamed you into life
I knew I loved you before I met you
I have been waiting all my life”
― Savage Garden

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
― Tom Waits

“On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

1. A beginning ends what an end begins.

2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.

3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself.

4. The best time is stolen time.

5. All work is the avoidance of harder work.

6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.

8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?

9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation.

10. Writer: how books read each other.

11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love.

12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything.

13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.

14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.

15. There are silences harder to take back than words.

16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.

17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.

18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.

20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.

21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.

22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.

23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).

24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?”
― James Richardson

“Love's gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“You know why I want you? I didn’t know I was lost until you found me. I didn’t know what alone was until the first night I spent without you in my bed. You’re the one thing I’ve got right. You’re what I’ve been waiting for, Pigeon.”
― Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Disaster

“Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Have you ever met someone and felt . . . I don't know how to describe it, felt a chance at having something that eluded you? I don't know . . . Forget I said anything."
I knew what he meant. He was describing that moment when you realize that you are lonely. For a time you can be alone and doing fine and never give a thought to living any other way and then you meet someone and suddenly you become lonely. It stabs at you, almost like a physical pain, and you feel both deprived and angry, deprived because you wish to be with that person and angry, because their absence brings you misery. It's a strange feeling, akin to desperation, a feeling that makes you wait by the phone even though you know that the call is an hour away. I was not going to lose my balance. Not yet.”
― Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites

“Nobody really knows her
Except the chosen few
Her secrets are kept hidden
Behind that sun-kissed hue.

If I reach out to touch her
She’ll just run away
My Forever and Always
Will have to wait another day.”
― Simone Elkeles, Chain Reaction

“When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Stand at the crossroads if you will, but if you'll not choose, I'll move on without you”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart

“I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.”
― Jess C Scott, The Devilin Fey

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Benediction

“It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald

“One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers

“Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss...”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up