Pam > Pam's Quotes

“Here is why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own.

...I beg of you, pretend you are a dog like me and LISTEN to other people rather than steal their stories.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

“Instead, what I was beginning to understand was that however things unfolded from here on, whatever the next chapter was, my life could never be the sum of one circumstance. It would be determined, as it had always been, by my willingness to put one foot in front of the other, moving forward, come what may.”
― Liz Murray, Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn't only in getting it wrong. It was a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
― Robert Frost

“I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”
― E.E. Cummings

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
― Plato

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
― Robert Frost

“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”
― Charles Bukowski

“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
― W.H. Auden, New Year Letter