Soonae Paschall > Soonae's Quotes

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“If one word can mean so many things at the same time then I don't see why I can't.”
― Samantha Hunt, The Seas

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
― Virginia Woolf

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I stood at midnight in the orchard.
There were so many stars, and yet the stars,
The very blackness of the night, though perfectly
Cold and clear, seemed to me to be insubstantial,
The whole veil of things seemed less substantial
Than the thing that moved in the dark behind me,
An unseen bird or beast, something shifting in its sleep,
Half-singing and then forgetting it was singing:
Be thou always ravished by love, starlight running
Down and pulling back the veil of the heart,

— Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from “Plants Fed On by Fawns,” The Orchard (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2004)”
― Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard

“If you're an oak
you don't pretend
you are a flower”
― Matsuo Bashō

“The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all.”
― Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

“to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“When asked the inevitable question, whether I’d wear eyeliner if I was the last person on earth, no, hell no. Eyeliner is war. When I’m alone, I lay my weapons down.”
― Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets