Samantha > Samantha's Quotes

“If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.”
― Rollo May, Love and Will

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. ”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
― Alice Munro, Selected Stories

“I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same. ”
― Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman

“What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.”
― Alice Munro

“There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral...But I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous...more extravagant and bright. We are...raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”
― Annie Dillard

“The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.”
― Annie Dillard

“You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

“The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his incouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
― Annie Dillard

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.”
― Annie Dillard

“The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”
― Truman Capote, Answered Prayers

“I don't want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.”
― Truman Capote

“morning was in the room and pigeons were gargling on the fire escape.”
― Truman Capote

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

- The Song of Wandering Aengus”
― William Butler Yeats, A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of W.B. Yeats

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut