Amy > Amy's Quotes

“Summer moon -
Clapping hands
I herald dawn”
― Matsuo Bashō

“My grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get soaked—you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, “At last one can breathe!” and would run up and down the soaking paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“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

“stay together
learn the flowers
go light”
― Gary Snyder

“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.”
― Aldo Leopold

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?”
― Aldo Leopold

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
― Albert Camus

“The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass”
― Ezra Pound