Grace Cuozzo > Grace's Quotes

“It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”
― Alexander Pope , The Rape of the Lock

“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”
― William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
― Aristotle

“We move between two darknesses.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one's fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist—it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create, and the fine fabric of a lyric is no more fitted to contain this point of view than a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?”
― Virginia Woolf

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves