Belinda Jonak > Belinda's Quotes

“Said Pinocchio's lover, midst sighs,
My puppet's technique takes the prize.
He gives me full measure
Through dishonest pleasure:
I sit on his face and he lies.”
― Jennifer Kaufman, A Version of the Truth

“Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.”
― Sylvia Plath

“The Cat

The cat licks its paw and lies down in the bookshelf nook. She can lie in a sphinx position without moving for so many hours and then turn her head to me and rise and stretch and turn her back to me and lick her paw again as if no time had passed. It hasn't and she is the sphinx with all the time in the world in the desert of her time the cat knows where flies die sees ghosts in the motes of air and shadows in sunbeams. She hears the music of the spheres and the hum in the wires of houses and the hum of the universe in interstellar spaces but prefers domestic places and the hum of the heater.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver, House of Light

“Retort on Mordaunt's "The Call"

I hate that drum's discordant sound, parading round, and round: To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields, and lures from cities and from fields, to sell their liberty for charms of tawdry lace, and glittering arms; and when Ambition's voice commands, to march, and fight, and fall in foreign lands. I hate that drum's discordant sound, parading round and round; to me it talks of ravag'd plains, and burning towns, and ruin'd swains, and mangled limbs, and dying groans, and widows' tears, and orphans' moans; and all that Misery's hand bestows, to fill the catalogue of human woes.”
― John Scott of Amwell

“To me it was plain silly. It is so obvious that life works in terms of species rather than individuals. The individual just has to be born, to develop to the point at which it can procreate, and then to fall away into death to make way for its successors, and humans are no exception whatever they may fancy.”
― Diana Athill , Somewhere Towards the End

“I am not sure that digging in our past guilts is a useful occupation for the very old, given that one can do so little about them. I have reached a stage at which one hopes to be forgiven for concentrating on how to get through the present.”
― Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End

“We have all seen them circling pastures, have looked up from the mouth of a barn, a pine clearing, the fences of our own backyards, and have stood amazed by the one slow wing beat, the endless dihedral drift. But I had never seen so many so close, every limb of the dead oak feathered black; and I cut the engine let the river grab the jon boat and pull it toward the tree... Then as I passed under their dream, I saw for the first time its soft countenance the raw fleshy jowls, wrinkled and generous like the faces of the very old who have grown to empathize with everything. And I drifted away from them, reluctant, looking back at their roost, calling them what they are- transfiguring angels who pray over the leaf graves of the anonymous lost with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.”
― David Bottoms

“As a scientist Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it”
― Bulwer-Lytton

“So much affirmation ends up sounding like a murder of crows passing overhead and it is easy to be afraid of murder-by-crow-- though sometimes you have to start flapping your arms and follow them.”
― Lucia Perillo

“Now that we've entered the wave of extinction let's sing while we still can...Quick, climb onto my back and cry wreck it wreck it like a frog in the grip of ecstatic amplexus”
― Lucia Perillo

“Frankenswine:

Like an old crazy quilt, I'm pieces and parts from nine different bodies and five different hearts. My brain is a poet's, my snout's from a thief, my hooves all belonged to the old fire chief, I'm slogging thru swamps and mist covered bogs, hunted by farmers with torches and dogs. Thru mountains and towns, over oceans and snow, I've landed here on this arctic ice floe. So I sit here alone at the world frozen end, just looking for someone whom I can call friend.”
― Doug Cushman

“There are species on this planet we've never seen. They live in lands and seas that no human has ever explored, and they are struggling to survive in a world unknown to us...We destroy their homes. And then they are gone, before we even have a chance to meet them.
Every species on this planet tells a story, an evolutionary novel packed with generations upon generations of knowledge. Letting those species disappear is like setting fire to every library on earth...the key to understanding life itself- is right here: millions of years of trial and error, data we can never even hope to accrue on our own...The only way we will ever learn what animals have to teach us about ourselves- about life- is if we keep them around.”
― Christie Wilcox, Venomous: How Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry

“In all likelihood, the most significant of these is a heightened chance of acquiring harmful parasites or diseases from a conspecific. Both parasites and pathogens are often species-specific and many of them have evolved mechanisms to defeat their host’s immune defenses. As a result, predators that consume their own kind run a greater risk of picking up a disease or a parasite than do predators that feed solely on other species.”
― Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History

“Spanish Moss- A Southern Gothic, a Live Oak Lady, caressing limbs, secret and shady. Wild and pale, curly and thin, She's a tease in the breeze. She sways in the wind.”
― Charles Ghigna

“-you must Be the thing you see: You must enter in to the small silences between the leaves, take your time and touch the very peace they issue from”
― John Moffitt

“Don't worry spiders, I keep house casually.”
― Kobayashi Issa

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“maggie and milly and molly and may"

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea”
― E. E. Cummings, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

“I went into the woods with nothing to tether me to this world- to remember how to listen- to remember how to see- Someday I hope to stay who I am in the woods when out of them- Aware- Grateful- Awed”
― Tracie Vaughn Zimmer

“Diamonds on the petals, Silver on the stems, Early morning sunrise Turns dewdrops into gems.”
― Charles Ghigna

“We with our quick dividing eyes measure, distinguish and are gone. The forest burns, the tree frog dies, yet one is all and all are one.”
― Judith Wright

“It's tempting to think that when we look at the world, we see what's in front of us, but in reality we can see only what our eyes allow us to see.

Progress occurs when opposite sides engage with each other rather than talk past each other. Debate and disagreement done right force us to find new ways to answer questions, to look for mistakes, to reevaluate how we understand the world we share.

We have reached a point in history when we impact the chemistry and biology of our planet. We are that powerful. But we are also endowed with gifts of even greater power. We have the capacity to communicate, to learn quickly, to change course, to create and re-create, to make decisions for the health of the oceans, to speak up. We can protect this stunning planet we all share if we grow a collective spine.

As humankind, we have emerged from the youth of civilization. We have struggled through our pubescence and reached the moment when our youthful good looks and passion are colliding with our need to grow up. Our collective emotions are still hot, however. Our dancing turns too simply to fighting, often for the wrong reasons. We fall in love easily, but often with things that don't matter or even harm us, things that numb us to the thousands of ever more discernible darts we are shooting at our own planet. This can lead to terrible mistakes, even self-destruction.”
― Juli Berwald

“As well as you can, live the life you want to live and make the work you want to make. After you're gone it'll all be sorted out or not. You won't be around to worry about it. Focus on the parts you're around for.”
― John Scalzi

“My Schadenfreude phaser is set to "Meh".”
― John Scalzi

“Why do they keep fighting?...Wouldn't it be easier just to stop?...They're stupid and crazy. ...Not crazy. More like- rationally insane. When people fight for ideals, no price is too high, no fight can be surrendered. They aren't fighting for money, or power, or control. Not really. They're fighting to destroy their enemies. So even if they destroy everything around them, it's worth it, because they know that they will have destroyed the traitors. ...But they all call each other traitors. ... Indeed. It's a long tradition here. I'm sure whoever first started questioning their political opponents' patriotism thought they were being quite clever. ...Humans created generals and colonels and majors, people who kept their hands clean while they ordered others to cover themselves in blood.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi

“The play is about a man who's forced to face the reality of human depravity. He lives in a fallen world, in which 'right' and 'wrong' is whatever he decides. 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. ...in a fallen world Hamlet realized that there's no good or bad, no right or wrong...everything is just a matter of opinion. Facts and rules are useless. Truth isn't important. ...There's a kind of freedom in that, isn't there? It lets you do or say whatever you want to achieve your goals. But it's not freedom for everyone, It's only freedom for you. It means you can sacrifice anyone for your benefit. You can justify killing innocents by saying it's for the greater good. ...No one who changes morals as easily as changing clothes should have power over other people's lives.”
― Lisa Kleypas

“We were looking for the "real" outback where the men are men and the sheep are nervous.”
― Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country

“...hope for a healthier society: - A healthy society is one that provides access to vegetables, fruits and animal protein and rejects the multiple processed foods and desserts that have flooded our markets.
- A healthy society is one that decreases pollutants that contaminate the air we breathe and the water we drink.
- A healthy society should have open spaces for its people to hike, walk, saunter or just sit reading a book or taking time to watch the sun set.
- A healthy society has compassion for its individual members and a reverence to the Earth that harbors them.
To do that each of us has to take responsibility for our own health. Succumbing to the plethora of unhealthy foods, drugs, alcohol and tobacco will not make a healthy individual. Poor health habits lead to disease, the taking of multiple medications with side effects and the inability to live life fully. Our consumer industries feed off our unhealthy habits and in concordance, our health care becomes ever more expensive. These choices are up to us.”
― Robert Ashley M.D. U.C.L.A.

“Worship a cabbage white butterfly, or a cabbage root maggot, or a cabbage. For God is all of these equally, or nothing at all: take your pick. A messiah would be better off appearing as a flower- able to turn water into nectar- look there for a miracle! Worship what you will if you must...but the world needs love more than worship. In love lies the only real shelter there is...”
― Robert Michael Pyle