Maya > Maya's Quotes

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
I am the way to go among the lost.

Justice caused my high architect to move,
Divine omnipotence created me,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me there were no created things
But those that last forever—as do I.
Abandon all hope you who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“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

“Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
― Emily Dickinson

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
― Emily Dickinson

“We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are "free" to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What Is to Be Done?

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to.”
― Stephen King, Dolores Claiborne

“I don’t think the world should assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does. I don’t think it’s such a big thing anymore, but the idea that you sacrifice everything for your children—it’s a load of rubbish. It leads to very destructive living and thinking, and it has a much worse effect on children than if you go out and live your own life. You’re meant to adore your children at all times, and you’re not meant to have a bad thought about them. That’s facism, you know, and it’s elevating the child at the expense of the mother. It’s like your life is not valid except in fulfilling this child’s needs. What about all your needs, your desires, your wants, your problems? They’re going to come out anyway, so it’s better they’re acknowledged straight off. Having said that, I really do believe that children have to be protected. They have to be loved. Somewhere between the two, I think, something needs to be sorted out. The relationship between parent and child is so difficult and so complex. There’s every emotion there. We mostly only acknowledge the good ones. If we were allowed to talk about the other ones, maybe it would alleviate them in some way”
― Marina Carr

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“Love is not consolation. It is light.”
― Simone Weil

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”
― Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera

“The women who love women wrote a song for the faggots. It was called, "Anything you do that the men don't like is o.k. by us.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“Nothing can defeat the spirit of the earth.

The fairies know that the earth will not tolerate the men much longer. The earth, scarred and gouged and stripped and bombed, will deny life to the men in order to stop the men. The fairies have left the men's reality in order to destroy it by making a new one.”
― Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

“All we really need is bread, water, love, and work that we enjoy and are good at, and an undying faith in and love of ourselves, our freedom and our dignity. All that stuff is practically free, so how come it's so hard to get”
― Cookie Mueller, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black

“Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“For the night is dark and full of terrors.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings