Famous Quotes Ipsum

Love is a great beautifier. once you are real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. it is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of anna, vronsky, the railway station and death, or the meeting of beethoven, tomas, tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. for he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty. it's awfully hard to be b-b-brave when you are only a very small animal. the whole difference between construction and creation is this; that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed, but a thing created is loved before it exists. in our minds we can understand the highest god, but so long as we are in human bodies living in this rich and varied world, we need images that we can see and touch and love. and each one of them shows us a part of that supreme power, and all the parts together give us a glimpse of the whole. so the people who insist there is only one god are right, and so are those who honor the many, but they are right in different ways. when you try to stifle laughter, it just gets worse. it gurgles and bubbles and rises until you're ready to explode with it - like in church or in a judge's chambers or in a business meeting... you can gulp back tears if necessary. you can certainly swallow words you know will get you into trouble if you speak them. you can grind your teeth and not cry out in pain. but there's no way to swallow laughter, real laughter. i felt i excelled in competing with others, and i knew instantly that these people were not competing at all, that they were acting in a strange, powerful trance of movement together. and i was filled with longing to act with them, and with the fear that i could not. each of us has within our power the ability to disrupt and transform some of the barriers we have overcome. but to do so, we must each recognize the privilege of our positions. we must not only fulfill our own potential, but also actively work to foster the potential of our neighbors. the three of them were beautiful, in the way all girls of that age are beautiful. it can't be helped, that sort of beauty, nor can it be conserved; it's a freshness, a plumpness of the cells, that's unearthed and temporary, and that nothing can replicate. none of them was satisfied with it, however; already they were making attempts to alter themselves, to improve and distort and diminish, to cram themselves into some impossible, imaginary mould, plucking and pencilling away at their faces. the bravest are the tenderest. the loving are the daring. love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. if you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. but in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. it will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. to love is to be vulnerable. we all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different, and yet the same. man is the artificer of his own happiness. probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair. you loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. the only way to avoid that pain was not to love anymore, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. the secret to not being hurt like this again, i decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. a kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. that's basic spelling that every woman ought to know. absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. tree-sitting is a last resort. when you see someone in a tree trying to protect it, you know that every level of our society has failed. the consumers have failed, the companies have failed, and the government has failed. friends of the forests have gone to the courts, activists have tried to make consumers aware, but with no results. corporations have neglected their responsibility as landowners, while the government has refused to enforce its laws. everything has failed, so people go into the trees. books are a uniquely portable magic..

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words? the flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all. if we could stay that way forever; if we could stay filled to the brim and floating toward the darkness, never suffocating or dying - . we act empty and innocent / but we are fueled by distortions of lives led in discontent / trading misfortunes / 'cause faith is one thing that is hard to deliver / it feels to funny to be free i celebrate myself, and sing myself. lurid isn't your style. i would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating. they mustn't know my despair; i can't let them see the wounds which they have caused; i couldn't bear their sympathy and their kind-hearted jokes - it would only make me want to scream all the more. if i talk, everyone thinks i'm showing off; when i'm silent they think i'm ridiculous; rude if i answer, sly if i get a good idea, lazy if i'm tired, selfish if i eat a mouthful more than i should, stupid, cowardly, crafty, etc, etc. one of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash. everything in life is its own little world, but most of us have gotten so caught up in our narrow arenas that we've forgotten to realize the magic and the beauty that are in all the other little interconnected worlds, too. diversity is as wide as all the tones of voice, ways of walking, coughing, blowing one's nose, sneezing. we first distinguish grapes from among fruits, then muscat grapes, then those from condrieu, then from desargues, then the particular graft. is that all? has a vine ever produced two bunches alike, and has any bunch produced two grapes alike? i have never judged anything in exactly the same way. i cannot judge a work while doing it. i must do as painters do and stand back, but not too far. the idea behind the tuxedo is the woman's point of view that 'men are all the same, so we might as well dress them that way.' that's why a wedding is like the joining together of a beautiful glowing bride and some guy. the tuxedo is a wedding safety device, created by women because they know men are undependable. so in case the groom chickens out, everybody just takes one step over, and and she marries the next guy. it doesn't take much to rip us into pieces. he had a good memory, and a tongue tied in the middle. this a combination which gives immortality to conversation. imagination decides everything..

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels. to talk to each other is but a more animated and audible thinking. the heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night. if a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as michelangelo painted, or beethoven composed music, or shakespeare composed poetry. he should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well. these qualities are rare enough in a world where sexual performance has become as obligatory as sexual abstinence - or the pretension to it - once was. the worst by-product of the so-called sexual revolution is the substitution of performance for passion. her guilty conscience was as vague as original sin. i have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws ere i'll weep. feel the fear and do it anyway. i liked how sterile my room was, cleansed of all the emotions that have ever been felt there, all the fights and lovemaking and plain rest of weary travelers wiped clean, leaving no mark on the perfectly made bed. i try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time. the choice may have been mistaken - the choosing was not. janis joplin taught me about passion. he felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not now where he ended and she began. wit is educated insolence. the most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed. knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens. he looked like the love thoughts of women. he could be a bee to a blossom -- a pear tree blossom in the spring. he seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. spices hung about him. he was a glance from god. be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind. you just have to let yourself go and not be worried about what other people are going to say or the things that might come out... just jump right in, full force, and be as silly and stupid and adolescent and introspective as you want to be. i felt that i was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me. be interested in yourself beyond all experience, be with yourself, love yourself; the ultimate security is found only in self-knowledge. be honest with yourself and nothing will betray you. i would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating. to be upset over what you don't have is to waste what you do have. probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair. it's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. but then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses. history, as i recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells. you have to stay in shape. my grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. she's ninety-seven today, and we don't know where the hell she is. to love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight. ...not everything happened to me, but the things that didn't happen seem true to me in a way that sometimes things that really did happen don't..