Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
-C.S. Lewis

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
-C.S. Lewis

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

half of learning how to play/ is learning what not to play/ and she's learning the spaces she leaves/ have their own things to say/ and she's trying to sing just enough/ so that the air around her moves/ and make music like mercy/ that gives what it is/ and has nothing to prove.
-Ani DiFranco


I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald


When in the morning I looked upon the light, I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world.
-Sir Rabindranath Tagore


She is vulnerable for the same reason she is strong. Anything she puts her love in--she will trust. She will wait you out--she will put up with you--forever--if she loves you.
-John Irving

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.
-Jeanette Winterson


I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
-William Stafford


If she got really quiet and listened, new parts of her wanted to speak.
-SARK


You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.
-J. Krishnamurti


Intimacy happens in moments. The mistake we make is wanting it all the time.
-Jo Ann Magdoff


Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
-Gretel Ehrlich


And the sea will always be there for your soul to meet the tide.
-Ann Reed

When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.
-Alexander Graham Bell


The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
-Albert Einstein


Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
-Arthur Golden


It hurt me a little bit to stand there and lie. Sometimes truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.
-James McBride


It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
-Margaret Atwood


To be lost is only a failure of memory.
-Margaret Atwood


Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
-T.S. Eliot


For life is holy and every moment is precious.
-Jack Kerouac


I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind--and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
-Michel de Montaigne


Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.
-Percy Bysshe Shelly

I will be the gladdest thing under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

A little madness in the spring is wholesome even for the King.
- Emily Dickinson

Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring.
- Thomas Hardy