Passage Quotes

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“I am almost a hundred years old; waiting for the end, and thinking about the beginning.

There are things I need to tell you, but would you listen if I told you how quickly time passes?

I know you are unable to imagine this.

Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure, the impossible intensity of love and its dog-leaping happiness, the bleak blackness of passions unrequited, or unexpressed, or unresolved.”
― Meg Rosoff, What I Was

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.”
― Robinson Jeffers

“There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“Eyes that obstruct the road can be removed, but what happens when hearts block the passage?”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood: A Poignant Memoir About Parents and Passion in 1950s Pittsburgh

“I knew then why I had to suffer. The older we get, the more reasons God gives us to seek His comfort. In the end, He sends us just enough pain and suffering so that we will want to leave. If everything were perfect, we would never choose to go. He wants us to seek an end to our suffering because He wants us to want to come Home.”
― Kate McGahan, JACK McAFGHAN: Reflections on Life with my Master

“The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.”
― Mark Doty

“No thought is a stupid thought, those who are thoughtless are thought of as stupid.”
― Nate Spears, Inspiration 2 Smile

“It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.”
― Randall Munroe

“Second chances are not to be wasted. It is one of the most valuable lessons we can learn in life.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds: A Novel

“Live for everything, or die for nothing”
― Nate Spears

“If God had to build a door, it’s because we erected a wall.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“There's barely a hair's breadth
Between emergence and passage
So why misspend
The time in between?”
― Neil Mach, The Bedevilment of Bertie Lunn

“Any hand can condem, but it takes a helping hand to build.”
― Nate Spears, Inspiration 2 Smile

“I have lived a big life. For that I am grateful.

But as one disengages from it and grows more reflective and less involved in the day-to-day grind, I think it’s possible to discover wisdom, born of experience and thankfulness. You must “ swallow the shadow” i.e. the fear of death. You must let go of the image of the fit-body and the triumph of your ego-place in the overculture.

I think, if you can do that, this “good age” as I like to call it, can be full of radiant inspiration and tender memory. For in all it’s contradiction, somewhere, in the puzzle of life, is incredible beauty. And who does not want to know beauty through their remembering?”
― David Paul Kirkpatrick

“He knew a narrow deer path that switchbacked through breaks in the rocks and down the ridge. We soon came to flat ground where a few trees populated the foot of the ridge. Sycamores and white oaks, poplars and lindens quickly multiplied around us. Within only a marq or so the trees drew closer and closer together, their roots entangling and branches mingling. The path was fraught with roots that knotted up in strangled bundles until there was no path at all. We were forced to dismount and lead the horses.”
― Christopher C. Fuchs, The Depths of Redemption

“I've had so much time to think down here, and I want to say that I think that the most important thing in life are thankfulness, forgiveness, and love. Mama taught me to always be thankful. And when you say thank you it makes other people feel happy. And forgiveness, because, life is too short to be cross. It's also not fun. And, last but not least, love- because when you have love in your heart, nothing and no one can take it away from you.”
― Sarah Jio, All the Flowers in Paris

“Blythe's favorite shelf near the coffee area. She'd labeled it W.O.W. (WORDS OF WISDOM) and it was stocked with her perennial favorites with bookmarked passages.
Natalie used to love browsing that shelf. A book would never betray you or change its mind or make you feel stupid. She took down The Once and Future King and found a marked passage: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails."”
― Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop

“Wars were full of valour, coming of courage, fomenting of rage and the anticipation of victory. The soldiers were content with what they had spoiled, but it had made my mind run wild in the battles I had escaped.

How could I ever obliterate such memories? Such things were hard to forget.”
― Naveed Qazi, The Trader of War Stories

“People often look for a secret passageway to happiness. But the paths of happiness are obvious: To be happy, before everything else you must love yourself!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Life is a passage ; trees fall.
Tread on the evil, put down my misery!”
― Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms

“Death looks different when you know that death is not an end; when we realize that death is a passage of really the most glorious kind.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“The unbridled hymnal

becomes a prayer for sustenance.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“History is known for sugar-coating. Sometimes it's the only thing that can make it palatable. So it can come as no surprise that even on Mallow Island, South Carolina, the past is not as sweet as the name suggests.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Other Birds: A Novel

“A doorway is a passage, not a place of residence.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Understanding

With addiction at his door step
at times, depression rushing through
guided by the grace of God
understanding what is true.

God revealed an understanding
the poet listen and he prayed
people came from distant places
to read, deciding that they’d stay.

The man received true purpose
knowing God would light his way
the people help the poet
as he knelt down to pray.

The passage of his soul
this wonderful shade of blue
guided by the grace of God
the poet writes for you.”
― Ron Baratono

“There is no wall within which a door cannot be built.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It was watching the priestess in that moment, seeing her for what she was— stunning but bloody, gorgeous but mortal, bereft but joyful— that I understood, finally, about love. She had been telling me, but I couldn't see it, couldn't believe it until I saw her staring at the body of the man she'd loved, standing and singing, utterly undiminished by his absence. This was the lesson I couldn't learn even from a lifetime gazing into my own heart, from a million nights fighting Ruc or feeling him move inside me: Love is not some eternal state, but a delight in the paradise of the imperfect. The holding of a thing is inextricable from the letting go, and to love, you must learn both. The world was still beautiful—Ela felt that, and as she sang, I felt the music rising inside me finally, in my flesh and mind—the music of joy and all the wonder that cannot last, of joy, not in the having, but in the passage—and I opened my mouth to sing alongside her, to pour into the world that corporeal trembling without which our lives mean nothing, nor our deaths.”
― Brian Staveley, Skullsworn