“Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”
- William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
“…and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”
- Soren Kierkegaard, Journals (1843)
“I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year.”
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.”
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- W.B. Yeats, “He Wishes for the Cloths Of Heaven”
“I think I’ll move to Australia.”
- Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
- Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker
“They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember what it feels like to be yourself.”
- Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
