Vivian > Vivian's Quotes

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
― Nora Ephron

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies

“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
― Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”
― Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing? (136-137)”
― Sri S. Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali

“The prospect of change is a many-fanged beast, my dear.”
― Christopher Moore, Practical Demonkeeping

“She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”
― J.D. Salinger

“You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
― Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

“Don't wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel, stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself.”
― Sara Henderson

“Come to me, squeeze my hand, know my loneliness, and give me the love, the strength to prevail on the perilous road before me.”
― Dang Thuy Tram

“A good book is an event in my life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”
― Ben Okri

“Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me"

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves,
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment,
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain—
imagine! imagine!
the wild and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.”
― Mary Oliver, What Do We Know

“in the afterglow
of an evening rain

i lay down
in the grass
and think of you

my body aches
like an after-kiss

breaking in soft fires
and wildflowers

my dear,
i will always be
this tender for you.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“oxygen

Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine

stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a

stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your

right shoulder which aches
all day. You are breathing
patiently; it is a

beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know

where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except

everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles

to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purest, sweet necessity: the air.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
― Leonard Bernstein