Graciesmoxie > Graciesmoxie's Quotes

“There were plenty of women around who dressed smartly, and plenty more who dressed to impress, but this girl was different. Totally different. She wore her clothing with such utter naturalness and grace that she could have been a bird that had wrapped itself in a special wind as it made ready to fly off to another world. He had never seen a woman who wore her clothes with such apparent joy. And the clothes themselves looked as if, in being draped on her body, they had won new life for themselves.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, Those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Secrets had an immense attraction to him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know, But it is you who are on trial.”
― A.A. Milne

“In the consciousness that another mind reflects your thought, you find the keenest satisfaction. Here is the high office of a friend, and in these high experiences is the point of attachment.-- ”
― Samuel McChord Crothers

“A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.”
― Samuel McChord Crothers

“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.”
― Basil King

“Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains

“We have no word for this darkness. It is not night and it is not ignorance. From time to time we all cross this darkness, seeing everything: so much everything that we can distinguish nothing. You know it, Marisa, better than I. It’s the interior from which everything came.”
― John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists

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

“And I sometimes think that a moment of touching is the difference between complete utter despair and the ability to carry on.”
― Eleanor Cameron, The Court of the Stone Children

“Animals died when their time came, and meanwhile they didn't bother with clothes, or go to war, or get drunk, or judge other animals by there look. They didn't get afraid unless there was something to be afraid of. She herself came apart with terror over something she couldn't define or understand. She didn't get afraid of something. She just got terrified> Filled with anxiety. For no reason. For no reason she could name. Would name.
Animals didn't look back with shivering shame at things in their past. They didn't quake at the thought of what lay ahead. They didn't try to make it into clique and feel sick with humiliation because they couldn't make it.”
― Mary Stolz, Cat in the Mirror

“The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.”
― Meindert DeJong, The Little Cow and the Turtle

“The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied.”
― Caroline Knapp

“When you quit drinking you stop waiting.”
― Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. ”
― Theodor Adorno

“Soon or late, every dog's master's memory becomes a graveyard; peopled by wistful little furry ghosts that creep back unbidden, at times, to a semblance of their olden lives.”
― Albert Payson Terhune

“How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn't want or need anything from them.”
― Gail Godwin

“Casey recalled how Gail defended herself in the parking lot of the English & Philosophy Building from the unwanted attentions of a lecherous fellow student, who shall remain nameless. ‘Please leave me alone,’ Ms Godwin warned the offending student, ‘or I shall be forced to wound you with a weapon you can ill afford to be wounded by in a town this small.’ The threat was most mysterious, not to mention writerly, but the oafish lecher was not easily deterred. ‘And what might that weapon be, little lady?’ the lout allegedly asked. ‘Gossip,’ Gail Godwin replied.”
― John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir

“The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It's the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment. He needs it. Because he understands that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is his secret strength.”
― Gail Godwin, The Finishing School

“Not everybody gets to grow up. First you have to survive your childhood, and then begins the hard work of growing into it.”
― Gail Godwin, Grief Cottage

“Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.”
― Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“Then he laughed, his typical laugh. Making me wish i had ten more such anectodes stashed away to keep him standing there, holding onto me and laughing.”
― Gail Godwin

“The future arches above us all like a giant question mark, looming or embracing by whims and turns.”
― Gail Godwin

“In friendships . . . the requisits are always the same. Each provides the other with a refuge in time of trouble, with a continuum to fall back on in time of self-doubt, with an underpinning of earned trust upon which it is possible to build new achievements.”
― Gail Godwin, Glass People: A Novel

“I contemplated how I was going to get through the rest of the day and felt the onset of a terror I thought I had outgrown.

I hated it when these clusters started to form. One unwelcome subject sought out its counterparts—farewells, people leaving and never coming back, ambulances.... And then those counterparts attracted similar old hurts and horrors until you were trapped in the nucleus of the cluster. This cluster, I knew, was labeled LOSS in big black letters. I knew this much, thanks to therapy and training, but simply knowing it didn't protect you from reacting to it over and over again. Until one day you resolved to sit down in the middle of the nucleus, fold your arms, and invite the cluster to do its worst. And if you survived that, you could look around and see what was left in its absence.”
― Gail Godwin, Grief Cottage