Quotations

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Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.
- MITCH ALBOM

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The difference between what we do and what we are capable of would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.

- GHANDI

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This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honourably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

- RUMI

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A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time for love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

- Adapted from ECCLESIASTES 3:6

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The sea's only gifts are harsh blows and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea but I do know that that's the way it is here, and I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions - facing the blind deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.
- JON KRAKAUER

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How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.

- RUMI

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I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbour—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps—what can more the heart of man desire?
- LEO TOLSTOY

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There are things in your life that might suck, be awful and challenging. You don't have to pretend they don't exist, but you can't dwell on them. They can define your past, but they shouldn't define your future.
- ROBERT HOGE

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There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.

- FRANK HERBERT

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To me, life is like an orchard. You pick the fruit when you see it. For years, I bummed around the world looking for happiness. Then one day I realised happiness isn't something you find. All the happiness in the world is between your two ears.

- JIM UNGER

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Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
- FRANK HERBERT

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There’s an internally recognised beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet. You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilising effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system’s capacity to sustain life. Life - all life -  is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships within relationships, within relationships.

- FRANK HERBERT

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But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
- ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

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Choose Life, only that and always, and at whatever risk. To let life leak out, to let it wear away by the mere passage of time, to withhold giving it and spreading it, is to choose nothing.

- SISTER ANN KELLY

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Walking down the street, where I walk in memory morning, noon and night, I could not tell what it was, precisely, that reduced me to such wretchedness. Indeed it was not death but rather the growing conviction of not having yet lived. All I could tell was that the stars were as singular and as wondrous as I remembered them and that they seemed like a link, an enticement to the great heavens, and that one day I would reach them and be absorbed into their glory, and pass from a world, that at that moment, I found to be rife with cruelty and stupidity, a world that had forgotten how to give.
- EDNA O'BRIEN

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Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.
- ECKHART TOLLE

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Put your thoughts to sleep,
do not let them cast a shadow
over the moon of your heart.
Let go of thinking.
- RUMI

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Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember
when my soul heard something from your soul.
- RUMI

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I drank water from your spring, and felt the current take me.
- RUMI

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Let silence take you to the core of life.
Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder.
Help someone's soul heal.
Walk out of your house like a shepherd.
- RUMI

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And watch two men washing clothes,
one makes dry clothes wet.
The other makes wet clothes dry.
They seem to be thwarting each other,
but their work is a perfect harmony.
Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice,
but there's really only one work.
- RUMI

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You think of yourself
as a citizen of the universe.
You think you belong
to this world of dust and matter.
Out of this dust
you have created a personal image,
and have forgotten
about the essence of your true origin
- RUMI

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I had a swimming feeling in my heart like a creature thrashing to get out and wanting to stay in at the same time. That is how much I came to love this man. This is how it is when a person joins your body and there is a part of your mind that swims to join that person against your will.
- AMY TAN

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In this life, we are given essentially two choices in any one situation.
One choice will bring more good into the world, and the other will not.
To become a better person, it is important to choose to do the good choice, even though it may be more difficult or time consuming.
- JENNIFER PHILLIPS

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Important things in life are: love, and the gaining of knowledge to learn how to be a better person, and to give something back to the world.
- JENNIFER PHILLIPS

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When someone takes it upon himself to categorise you, to define your position, or tell you how you must be, nine times out of ten he is defending his own status. His motivation rises from unconscious fears as well as ego. To have status, you must first convince others that they are below you. And for one party to convince, the other must assent.
- RUTH PARK

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There are only two real riches in the world: land to grow food, and women to grow men.
- RUTH PARK

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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
- REINHOLD NIEBUHR

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When she lapsed into generalistations, I saw on her face that a cog had slipped: her eyes, like his, took on a certain opaqueness, the mouth turned up a little, the head cocked slightly, and the words flowed out too easily to be the product of real, gritty thought. It was the repetition of a catechism.
- HELEN GARNER

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We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.
- JOHN LENNON

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And you want to get moving
And you want to stay still
But lost in the moment
Some longing gets filled
- JONI MITCHELL

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Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.
- RABINDRANATH TAGORE

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Do not say, 'It is morning', and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.
- RABINDRANATH TAGORE

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We have renewed ourselves before.
The pieces are in place for a renaissance of religion:
Cosmic knowledge, the power for good, awareness of mystery,
a sense of responsibility for all creation
and a longing for union with the Absolution.
What is required is imagination,
self confidence, courage.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
-UNKNOWN

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A serious relationship with a woman has to be like peeling a very big onion. There might be a bit of crying along the way, but you never wanted to stop peeling, you never wanted to be able to get to the centre of her.
- PETER FITZSIMONS quoting an Israeli hitchiker he picked up in Bulgaria on his way to Gallipoli.

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...But after four wonderful years in France, should I stay for another glorious year, or come home? At that very time I happened to be reading a book of short stories by the great French writer, Guy de Maupassant. One line in it convinced me what the right thing to do was: 'Ce n'etais pas quatre ans d'experience, c'etais un annee repete quatre fois.' Ah, sing it, Guy.
He was right! I hadn't really had four wonderful years; I'd had one wonderful year repeated four times over. And while that was great as far as it went ... it was time I went, too, and I did. Mix it up! Change the experience! If the only evidence of life is growth, make sure you keep growing, keep embracing new challenges. So I went home. And finally, one other literary line from another literary booger I never met: Vladimir Nabokov. 'Common sense,' he wrote, 'tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light, between two eternal walls of darkness.' Boom! I read it, not long after marrying and having our first child. That was the one that brought it all together. Forget all that transparent twaddle about eternal life and focus on that quote alone. Live so the tiny crack of light can be a rainbow crashing into a kaleidoscope factory. Colour! Movement! Lights, camera, action! DO SOMETHING. And then do something else. Keep going!
- PETER FITZSIMONS

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I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away to find in the very next moment its consolation in the left one.
- RABINDRANATH TAGORE

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Love is not angelic. It is not divorced from the flesh. It is carnal. Love is skin, bone, blood and fluid. It is the five senses - taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight - that form an ocean within, roaring, washing over, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling on the human tide. You can float and you can drown.
- WARWICK MCFADYEN

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Then I noticed for the first time the stars in the night sky. The cosmic landscape struck me for the first time. Only I mistook the stars for fruit dangling from the sky. So I began to beg her to pick me some stars, weeping.
- KO UN

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The garden of Love is green without limit
and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy.
Love is beyond either condition:
without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh.
- RUMI

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Now, I famously hate salad bars. I don't like buffets (unless I'm standing on the serving side: buffets are like free money for cost-conscious chefs). When I see food sitting out, exposed to the elements, I see food dying. I see a big open petri dish that every passing serial sneezer can feel free to drool on and fondle with spittle-flecked fingers. I see food not held at an ideal temperature, food rotated (or not) by person or persons unknown, left to fester in the open air unprotected from the passing fancies of the general public. Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light, sensible lunches? You're eating more bacteria that the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick. I remember my own words when designing buffets at a large club: "Fill 'em up on free salads and bread, so they go light on the shrimp."
- ANTHONY BOURDAIN

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You come into a relationship as two blocks of wood and you have these corners. Those corners make friction and bring sparks. You make a fire with those or you allow your corners to be knocked off.
-  TONI CHILDS

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We all need comfort. But for a couple, of course, it has its dangers ... we all want to live with desire, with passion, with evolution. When you are in a habit of things, can you survive if you don't lie to yourselves?
- JULIETTE BINOCHE

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Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies, of events and odours, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full daylight, blue loves of dusk and night fish with huge eyes.
- MAX WALTER SVANBERG IN "TROUBLE DEAF HEAVEN" BY BIN RAMKE

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It's just something that's always been inside of me, this kind of voice … I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
- JERRY HALL

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We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?' Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"
- ROBIN WILLIAMS PLAYING JOHN KEATING, IN MOVIE: "DEAD POETS SOCIETY".

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To melt and become as
the living waters.
Running and singing.
A flow of life in
My dreaming.
- WILLIAM RICKETTS

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She was very strict and very cold – and I am completely the opposite. She was afraid to show her feelings. She always said to me, "André, you don't have to look people in the eyes like you do." But I like to [do that]. That's why I have my face to the audience, unlike other conductors. I want to have this contact with people. It's how you connect. Everything goes through the eyes. My mother was afraid to look people in the eyes because then your feelings come. She is 96 now, still driving ... very independent and strong-willed. We have contact, but not much.
- ANDRÉ RIEU

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"I know we were a bit pickled but I did fall in love with him at that moment. It had gone beyond just an attraction. I saw the real man.... We had had a very mental attraction to each other and spent a lot of time in conversation," Geordiadis says of their early days together. "But those various moments when I had to become such a keen observer of him - well, it is so true the eyes really are a window to the soul; you do, as a painter, start to look very deeply into someone and there are things that are revealed in a person's face that say so much about the inner person."
- MARGARITA GEORDIADIS about partner, MAX CULLEN.

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The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

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The only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,
but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars
and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop
and everybody goes 'Awww!'
- JACK KEROUAC

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Keep your feet in the mud and your head in the clouds.
- DAVID BROMLEY

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These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that I ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.
- GERALDINE BROOKS

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I love him for what he was, for who he is, and for who he yet may be.
- JENNIFER PHILLIPS

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How do we tumble down a hill? A foot placed incautiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and all of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until we find ourselves sprawled in indignity at the bottom. So it seems apt indeed to speak of the Fall. For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling towards some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrive sullied and bruised and unable to regain our former place without hard effort.
- GERALDINE BROOKS

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Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

- NEIL GAIMAN

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I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

- NEIL GAIMAN

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May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

- NEIL GAIMAN

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Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

- NEIL GAIMAN

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Being happy in middle age cannot happen unless you work out what you want first. But knowing what it is, and fixing it? Not the same thing.
- SHARON HORGAN

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There is a fantasy that hits you in mid life when you're in the middle of all the working and the responsibilities and the mortgage, and that is: 'Could I set fire to my life, just leave it all behind, escape, radically downsize?' And it is tempting, but not many people have got the balls to actually do it.
- SHARON HORGAN

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I think a midlife crisis turns up when you exceed your ability to live up to other peoples' expectations.
- MAREE

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Women live a long time. I'm going to live a long time and I need to start seeing my life as the middle of my life - not the end of my life. And the women I met - they didn't just think: 'This is crap.' They got hold of their lives and shook them. Getting older and saggier and closer to death ... it's not the cheeriest thought, but it is a chance to make some drastic changes and I don't think women did that before. I think they would pop a valium and just go quietly mad behind net curtains. I think a fully blown, well executed midlife crisis is the way forward. And if that doesn't work, I'm just going to hit the gin.
- SHARON HORGAN

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Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It's not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon.
- MARLENA DE BLASI

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Your compartment for me is shallow and I would it were deep.
- JENNIFER PHILLIPS

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You assume that life is not out to get you - it's there to teach you and to introduce you to yourself. You love because it's sweeter than bitterness. And you realise that people are incredible, resilient, willing and capable, and that you are one of them.
- MARY COUSTAS

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Walking over dew-spangled grass is like walking across a carpet of jewels.
- JENNIFER PHILLIPS

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Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.
- MITCH ALBOM

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Take my hand and grow young with me; don't rush, don't sleep; be a beginner; light the candles; keep the fire; dare to love someone; tell yourself the truth; stay inside the rapture.
- MARLENA DE BLASI

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There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
- MARTHA GRAHAM

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Things are rarely as bad as they seem at the start of any major change. In any great upheaval there is a lot of emotion, a lot to cope with. But after a time - maybe a year or so, things tend to simmer down and settle - find a new level resting point. Then you can really start to build in a new direction.
- JENNIFER PHILLIPS

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Because being here is much, and because all this that's here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Everyone just once, once only. Just once, and no more. And we too, once. And never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the Earth seems irrevocable.
- RAINER MARIA RILKE

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Under the weight of greater or lesser fortunes, I think what happens to a great many of us is that we really don't know what we want or with whom we'd like to have it. Nothing seems real until it's already gone. Until it's sealed up tight, out of reach. Until it's dead. Be it a person or a dream. And then the light comes, and so we mourn.
- BARLOZZO quoted by MARLENA DE BLASI

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We set down these arbitrary age-markers for ourselves and others, as if destiny and fate work to the schedule we dictate. Life doesn't change at the turning of each decade. Life wends and winds and morphs itself around the little moments of each day. It's only on looking back that we compartmentalise it all and say, "Yes. That is who I am. It's all so clear and set in stone now." Of course it isn't clear. Neither is it set in stone. It never was. And it's far more fun to refuse to ever let it be set than to simply succumb.
- CORINNE GRANT

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'There never would have been anything the matter, if it hadn't been for that old Animal,' said my aunt, with strong emphasis. 'It's very much to be wished that some mothers would leave their daughters alone after marriage, and not be so violently affectionate. They seem to think the only return that can be made them for bringing an unfortunate young woman into the world - God bless my soul, as if she asked to be brought, or wanted to come! - is full liberty to worry her out of it again.'
- CHARLES DICKENS

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Touch me with your words, caress me with your heart, ignite me with your body, but love me with your mind.
- YOLANDA ISABEL REGUEIRA MARIN

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I know a woman who says it's only at three o'clock in the morning when anyone can measure things. She says if you love yourself at three o'clock in the morning, if there's someone in your bed that you love at least as much as you love yourself at three o'clock in the morning, if your heart is quiet in your chest and neither muses or shades crowd the room, it probably means that things are well. It's the hardest moment to lie to yourself, three o'clock in the morning, she told me.
- MARLENA DE BLASI

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I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbour—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps—what can more the heart of man desire?
- LEO TOLSTOY

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People who have only good experiences aren't very interesting. They may be content, and happy after a fashion, but they aren't very deep. It may seem a misfortune now, and it makes things difficult, but well--it's easy to feel all the happy, simple stuff. Not that happiness is necessarily simple. But I don't think you're going to have a life like that, and I think you'll be the better for it. The difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You must not let them defeat you. You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless.
- PETER CAMERON

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I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and no-one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
- NEIL GAIMAN

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There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth - not going all the way - and not starting.
- BUDDHA

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The Canarsie People said the knowing belongs to the old and wise, but the unfolding is in the keeping of the young. The old prevent the young from straying off the path of wisdom. The young yearn after the path of dreams. Between the two there is truth.
- BEVERLY SWERLING

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We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.
- CHUCK PALAHNUIK, FIGHT CLUB

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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.
- RAINER MARIA RILKE

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