- "I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes." -Ray Bradbury, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury
- “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” -Ray Bradbury
- "I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!" - Ray Bradbury, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury
- "What can I say? Who shall describe the light? It is like an epidemic; it is like your love.” -William Carlos Williams, “A Novelette"
- "Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain." —Henry James, from a letter to Grace Norton, dated 28 July 1883
- "I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’?" —Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 27 February 1926
- "The need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones." -Robert McCammon, Boys Life
- "After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots/spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear/ again the sky tangled in your voice." -Richard Jackson, from the poem "After All This"
- "Love, love, love, love is like sunshine: Sometimes you have to get burned to know you were there. I wanna know that I’m here, every single part of me, My heart, open as the river’s eyes the first time it sees the ocean, My god, look at those waves! Listen to that thundering tide! Can you imagine anything more frightening? Can you imagine anything more alive?" -Andrea Gibson, from the poem "Wasabi"
- "Desire's/ just another word for mourning - the gulf/ between all those lives we will never lead/ and the mornings when we wake alone/ upside down and inside, inside, inside out." -Amorak Huey, from the poem "Blues for Kim Addonzio"
- "I still believe/religion is/the pale taste of sweat on the skin of the breast of the woman I adore,/stain of blackberries on the fingers,/hot whisper against the throat—a prayer/to be loved that only the devout can hear." -Amorak Huey, from the poem "What Religion Means to Me"
- "Broken heart, you/ timeless wonder./ What a small/ place to be." -Robert Creeley, from the poem "Echo"
- “If it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.” ―Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories
- "Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?” ―Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
- “How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.” ―Julian Barnes
- “Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.” ―Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
- "A bikini is like the truth: what it reveals is interesting, but what it conceals is vital." -Daniel Handler
- "Romantic disasters are like natural ones. Even with warnings it is impossible to imagine what it will feel like when they strike, and you are left standing in the wreckage, wondering what in the world has happened. Head for the hills! Throw down sandbags! Stand in the doorway! Huddle in a sports arena! Nothing will protect you from the rush and the pain and the thunder. If you live in the world, the world will engulf you one way or another. There are no precautions sturdy enough, no shelters with thick enough walls, no agencies with enough funding to sustain you when the storm clouds gather and the world begins to shake. But far away, there may be a canoe coming with just enough space for you to move on to the next locale - no safe harbor, just a quiet place to breathe and change into dry clothes, before the next bout of turmoil and destruction." -Daniel Handler
- "I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter." -Colum McCann, from Let the Great World Spin
- "She's always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours." -Colum McCann, from Let the Great World Spin
- "The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own."-Colum McCann, from Let the Great World Spin
- "Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lost it, but sometimes it'd never even there in the first place." -Colum McCann, from Let the Great World Spin
- "The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough." -Colum McCann, from Let the Great World Spin
- "Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told." -Colum McCann
- "People who have experienced nothing love to tell stories while people who have experienced a great deal suddenly have no stories to tell at all." -Daniel Kehlman, from Fame, translated by Carol Brown Janeway
- "I wanna hold you like mine were the last arms in the world/I want them curled around you like the red and white stripes on a barber pole/I wanna give you a lump of coal for Christmas/and tell you in a million years it's gonna be a diamond/and will you wait for me til then?" -Shane Koyczan, from "Stop Signs"
- "Ainsi l'amoureux de la vie universelle entre dans la foule comme dans une immense résevoire d'élecricité. On peut aussi le comparer; lui à un miroir de la conscience, qui, à chacun de ses mouvements, représente la vie multiple et la grace mouvante de tous les éléments de la vie." -Charles Baudelaire, from Le peintre de la vie moderne
- "To a lover, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate." -John Berger, from Ways of Seeing
- "Forever begins when you say yes." -Stephen Powers, A Love Letter For You Murals
- "If you were here, I'd be home now." -Stephen Powers, A Love Letter For You Murals
- "I would like to be the air/that inhabits you for a moment/only. I would like to be that unnoticed/& that necessary." -Margaret Atwood, from "Variations on the Word 'Sleep'"
- "Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier." -Kurt Vonnegut, from Cat's Cradle
- "To live in this world/you must be able/to do three things:/to love what is mortal;/to hold it/against your bones knowing/your own life depends on it;/and, when the time comes to let it go,/to let it go." -Mary Oliver, from the poem "In Blackwater Woods"
- "The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden." -Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
- "The truth should always be a little irritating." -Khyentse Norbu
- "I'll be like the edge of an egg: fragile, hard, impossible, flawless." -Rives, from the poem "Gorgeous"
- "Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos." -Don Kardong
- "The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others." -Vincent Van Gogh
- "Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and in that love, there is a strength and a blessing." -Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to A Young Poet
- "Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself and see if we may not eff it after all." -Douglas Adams, from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
- "I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls." -Anais Nin
- "Art is the triumph over chaos." -John Cheever
- "When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy." -Salman Rushdie
- "Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot
- "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." -Oscar Wilde
- "I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me." -Anais Nin
feb 10 2009 ∞
jun 6 2012 +
jun 6 2012 +