Vivian > Vivian's Quotes

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  • #1
    Stanley Kunitz
    “The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
    Stanley Kunitz

  • #2
    Robert A. Heinlein
    “Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.”
    Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

  • #3
    Nora Ephron
    “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
    Nora Ephron

  • #4
    Joyce Carol Oates
    “I never change, I simply become more myself.”
    Joyce Carol Oates, Solstice

  • #5
    Robert Fulghum
    “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

  • #6
    George Bernard Shaw
    “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

  • #7
    Leo Tolstoy
    “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

  • #8
    François de La Rochefoucauld
    “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

  • #9
    Neil Gaiman
    “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

  • #10
    George S. Patton Jr.
    “If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
    George S. Patton

  • #11
    Nadezhda Mandelstam
    “I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.”
    Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope

  • #12
    Marguerite Duras
    “Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
    Marguerite Duras

  • #13
    Annie Proulx
    “You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
    Annie Proulx

  • #14
    Carl Sagan
    “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
    Carl Sagan

  • #15
    Fyodor Dostoevsky
    “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
    Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

  • #16
    Satchidananda
    “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

  • #17
    Christopher Moore
    “The prospect of change is a many-fanged beast, my dear.”
    Christopher Moore, Practical Demonkeeping

  • #18
    J.D. Salinger
    “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

  • #19
    Lucille Clifton
    “You might as well answer the door, my child,
    the truth is furiously knocking.”
    Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980

  • #20
    “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

  • #21
    Dang Thuy Tram
    “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

  • #22
    Stendhal
    “A good book is an event in my life.”
    Stendhal, The Red and the Black

  • #23
    Ben Okri
    “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

  • #24
    Mary Oliver
    “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

  • #25
    Sanober  Khan
    “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

  • #26
    Mary Oliver
    “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

  • #27
    Leonard Bernstein
    “Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
    Leonard Bernstein



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