Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.
I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life.
Every parent, no matter how cultured or sophisticated, will one day succumb to a child's pleas to visit Walt Disney World Resort.
Succes is really nothing more than the record of failure. To be successful means you must be willing to fail more than anyone else.
When you give something up, you need to fill the space where it used to be, and you understand the landscape in yourself a bit more.
Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea- for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.
There are times in life when language fails us, when everything that needs to be said can be expressed only by saying nothing at all.
I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.
Writers are often alone when they work. Hours pass in silence as one long moment; light fades as day turns back to face the coming night.
Libraries are the ultimate restaurants for brain food. I sleep better knowing there are libraries. I would take a bullet for a librarian.
Children are the closest we have to wisdom and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.
I think anyone can fall in love, if you're open and you're willing, but the real test is sustaining it after all the excitement has worn off.
Where are people going? I wonder what they hope will happen and what they are afraid of? For me it's the same thing and has to do with being loved.
We touched with a softness that pushed through the skin into memory, like arms plunged into a river - we could feel the weight of each other's stones.
I think we keep these moments of rejection and acceptance very close. I think we carry them always, like cracked shells from which a part of us once hatched.
The most frustrating part of trying to direct everything is not that it alienates you from people who genuinely want to help, but that it's actually impossible.
I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.
When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.
This is why fashion is such a magical part of our lives, for it inspires our decisions without dictating them; it sets the theme but not the limits of our aesthetic.
But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them?...How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?
Like surgeons trying to save a life, the conservators and preservers at New York City museums dedicate themselves to ensuring the longevity of works of art for public view.
You can't put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can't have one without the other.
I think you can love someone and be infatuated with them, too. But infatuation is immediate, while the sort of love in the West is something you build with someone. It's a trust.
But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists—seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt. Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.
I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.
It's true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don't meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.
I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment - we are all defined by something we can’t change.
If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy.
Some studies show that we're physically attracted, like animal attraction, to people that have a different immune system to us. So even though I love cologne, it's probably keeping me from finding a good mate.
Shoes are a neutral blessing for us because feet generally aren't regarded as a place where the battle for self-esteem is won or lost. Feet don't change size when the body does through the natural ageing process.
When somebody leaves this plane—or, if you like, goes into another room—those left behind sometimes try and stop loving—but this is a mistake, because even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.
I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.
In world mythology, there are countless examples of tragic characters whose greatest strength is also the source of their undoing. But the ancient Greeks and Romans also held the view that acceptance is the beginning of wisdom.
The joy of style lies not in how we look to other people, but in how we look to ourselves - and the most memorable and beautiful outfits are simply those that, in some rare moment of joy, we found the courage to share with the world.
Reading reassures us that no matter how alone we might feel, there are many others - spread as wide as history itself - who have felt the same way we have, who have occupied the rooms we find ourselves locked in at various points of our lives.
Perhaps we were each allotted only a certain amount of love - enough for only an initial meeting - a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we are faced with our humanness, our past, our very being.
When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.
Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet. It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: The history of how you felt.
Athens is the birthplace of modern tragedy. In the Greek tragic plays, the tableau of the characters would become a statue, like the statue of Oedipus reaching up to the Gods with blood spilling out of his eyes. I love the way the Greeks would immortalize experience. Things that all of us feel.
Life can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it. Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time. We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures.
Could it be that first love was the only true love? And that after those first fires had been doused or burned out, men and women chose whom they would love based on worldly needs, and then reenacted the rituals and feelings of that first pure experience - nursed the flames that once burned of their own accord
As a single parent, I had become tyrannical in order to survive, and anything I couldn't control caused me enormous anxiety. As a naturally untidy, disorganised man who never made lists or kept receipts, morphing into someone who could take care of a toddler on his own may have caused me to overcompensate a little.
Everything that we love will, at some point, be taken away from us. If I think about everyone I love eventually being taken away from me by death, or simply by getting lost from each other in the world, it makes me value them much more now. And I'm much less likely to be indifferent. For me, indifference is the end of life.
If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony; in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedrooms fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don't know then. But later you realize - that was the moment.
Relationships break down, because it's about self. But when you take the "I" out of it and you're like, how can I make them happy, that means sacrifice. I think you have to be prepared to sacrifice, and a lot of people just aren't willing to. You have to give up a piece of yourself. By doing that, you get a greater sense of who you are. When you give something up, you need to fill the space where it used to be, and you understand the landscape in yourself a bit more.
When I was in my early twenties, I fell in love at least 20 times a day. You have to be with someone where you think: if the world was full of people like you, I could not be monogamous. As you get older, you get to know yourself a little more. The older you get, the more you realize what you need. And you also realize how your choice in relationships is influenced by how you grew up. Now I feel like I've explored the dynamic of how I grew up, and I'm free to find someone who's really going to be a wonderful companion.