Charlene > Charlene's Quotes

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”
― Leopold Stokowski

“When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Intern

“The bridge will only take you halfway there, to those mysterious lands you long to see. Through gypsy camps and swirling Arab fair, and moonlit woods where unicorns run free. So come and walk awhile with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I've known. But this bridge will only take you halfway there. The last few steps you have to take alone.”
― Shel Silverstein

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.”
― Yogi Bhajan

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.”
― Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit

“Often, we melt into our ecstasies as though they were jams, as though we were sinking into syrupy bowls of gooseberries, of raspberries, of bilberries.”
― Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“We loved with a love that was more than love.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
― T.S. Eliot

“It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”
― Albert Einstein

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
― Pablo Picasso

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“What you seek is seeking you.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“We are mosaics - pieces of light, love, history, stars -- glued together with magic and music and words.”
― Anita Krishan

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.”
― Richard Russo

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise