H > H's Quotes

“I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

“The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer...”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“True that life is given,
And received. But truer still:
The single-act of giving
Makes the offerer the beggar, too—

For when down on the knees
The man (or god) stretches the arms
In giving,
It is no accident the hands
Are curled like bowls or cups,
For he offers self, yet
Begs it back again.”
― Edith L. Tiempo, An Edith Tiempo Reader

“It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“But it was late.
We had to go home.
We listened
to the river singing,
the river singing stone.”
― Myrna Peña-Reyes, The River Singing Stone: Poems

“Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil than the curve of eggs.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“...your pain brand new no matter how long it lasts which now means years...”
― Andrew Motion

“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“... I touch your absence here
Remembering the speeches of your hair.”
― Carlos A. Angeles, A Bruise Of Ashes: Collected Poems

“I can no more hear Love’s
Voice.”
― Jose Garcia Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems

“Whoever is missing in action turns
Into a flower, after he reappears
In stories, such as the old people were
Telling...”
― Simeon Dumdum Jr., Poems: Selected and New, 1982-1997

“Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe: Masterpiece Essays on Nature, Philosophy, and the Human Condition

“The truth is, however, that there is nothing very “normal” about nature. Once upon a time there were no flowers at all.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“It was the world of the abyss, supposedly as lifeless as the earth’s first midnight.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.”
― Francis G. Thompson

“And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a gallant gentleman.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“...our heads, the little globes which hold the midnight sky and the shining, invisible universes of thought, have been taken about as much for granted as the growth of a yellow pumpkin in the fall.”
― Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

“To scale all love down
To a cupped hand’s size”
― Edith L. Tiempo

“All that I love
I fold over once
And once again”
― Edith L. Tiempo

“True that life is given,
And received. But truer still:
The single-act of giving
Makes the offerer the beggar, too—”
― Edith L. Tiempo

“It’s utter sublimation,
A feat, this heart’s control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand’s size”
― Edith L. Tiempo

“For when down on the knees
The man (or god) stretches the arms
In giving,
It is no accident the hands
Are curled like bowls or cups,
For he offers self, yet
Begs it back again.”
― Edith L. Tiempo

“Love is many and truth is just,
And so we are; Both
What we choose,
And we refuse.”
― Edith L. Tiempo

“All those years and their moments—
Crackling bacon, slamming car doors,
Poems tried out on friends,
Will be one more archive,
One more shaky text.”
― Gary Snyder

“To,speak,of,the,interior,of,light,
Requires,speaker,broken,by,light.”
― Jose Garcia Villa

“The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.”
― Anne Sexton

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I was aware of the treacherous air vents above us, conducting the sounds we were making upstairs. Maybe dad was listening. Or maybe, just like Kevin, he was unaware of anything but the pleasure spurting up out of his body and into mine.”
― Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

“When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice