Quotes by Essayists - Page 105

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
Joseph Brodsky
A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
Walt Whitman
Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.
Walt Whitman
Peace is always beautiful.
Walt Whitman
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
Walt Whitman
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
Virginia Woolf
My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.
Osip Mandelstam
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.
Walt Whitman
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.
Charles Baudelaire
Resist much, obey little.
Walt Whitman
Quotation confesses inferiority.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our favorite games were killing.Our favorite books were death.It had been beaten into us:God is love.Not the parched face and gnarledcapes across a stick body; jitteringin the nude sky, we couldn't seetrying to touch usfor the blood in our eyes.
Joseph Bathanti
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however - it was not their custom. Their faces, a little less caustic than usual at least, expressed a gentle satisfaction at death's impartiality.
Thomas Mann
That's what life is all about - you're busy, I'm busy, and the end result is death. Sooner or later, that's what it comes to. ("The Death Of Wang Asao")
Xiao Hong
I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.
Marilynne Robinson
Life into death— Life’s other shape, No rupture, Only crossing.
Dejan Stojanovic
Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.
Dejan Stojanovic
They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]
Virginia Woolf
If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.
Dejan Stojanovic
The Death's Field is the mirror which allows us the knowledge of the world we living in.
Sorin Cerin
And now she was thinking of her own death, with her heart gripped not by fear but by the excitement of a great discovery, the feeling that she was about to learn what she had been unable to learn from her brief experience of love. What she thought about death was childish, but what could never have touched her in the past now filled her with poignant tenderness, as sometimes a familiar face we see suddenly with the eyes of love makes us aware that it has been dearer to us than life itself for longer than we have ever realized.
Georges Bernanos
The taste one gets of death in dreams I find more penetrating and atmospheric than the ordinary fear one might suffer while awake.
Thomas Keneally
Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.
Marilynne Robinson
The belief in death leads meditating about life; meanwhile, the belief in life leads you thinking about death.
Sorin Cerin
Puis il réfléchit: la réalité ne coïncide habituellement pas avec les prévisions; avec une logique perverse, il en déduisit que prévoir un détail circonstanciel, c'est empêcher que celui-ci se réalise. Fidèle à cette faible magie, il inventait, pour les empêcher de se réaliser, des péripéties atroces; naturellement, il finit par craindre que ces péripéties ne fussent prophétiques. Misérable dans la nuit, il essayait de s'affirmer en quelque sorte dans la substance fugitive du temps. Il savait que celui-ci se précipitait vers l'aube du 29; il raisonnait à haute voix; je suis maintenant dans la nuit du 22; tant que durera cette nuit (et six nuits de plus) je suis invulnérable, immortel. Il pensait que les nuits de sommeil étaient des piscines profondes et sombres dans lesquels il pouvait se plonger. Il souhaitait parfois avec impatience la décharge définitive qui le libérerait tant bien que mal de son vain travail d'imagination.
Jorge Luis Borges
Search for the stranger inside you, forgotten even by your death.
Sorin Cerin
Loneliness is the standard that separates life from death.
Sorin Cerin
I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.
Edward Thomas
No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.
Al Álvarez
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen.
David Foster Wallace
Addio, Dann. Addio, piccolo signor Rail, che mi hai insegnato la vita. Avevi ragione tu: non siamo morti. Non è possibile morire vicino a te. Perfino Mormy ha aspettato che tu fossi lontano per farlo. Adesso sono io che vado lontano. E non sarà vicino a te che morirò. Addio, mio piccolo signore, che sognavi i treni e sapevi dov'era l'infinito. Tutto quel che c'era io l'ho visto, guardando te. E sono stata ovunque, stando con te. È una cosa che non riuscirò a spiegare mai a nessuno. Ma è così. Me la porterò dietro, e sarà il mio segreto più bello. Addio, Dann. Non pensarmi mai, se non ridendo. Addio.
Alessandro Baricco
He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.
Salman Rushdie
Yes, he is here in thisopen field, in sunlight, amongthe few young trees set outto modify the bare facts--he's here, but onlybecause we are here.When we go, he goes with usto be your hands that neverdo violence, your eyesthat wonder, your livesthat daily praise lifeby living it, by laughter.He is never alone here,never cold in the field of graves.
Denise Levertov
One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.
Edward Abbey
What branch does not have its leaves and which twig will not have its flowers?
Sorin Cerin
The only advantage of knowledge is that it can justify suffering.
Sorin Cerin
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
Roland Barthes
Who can be worried without the light of a memory?
Sorin Cerin
Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.
Luis Alberto Urrea
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
George Santayana
Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.
Carolyn Kizer
The South-wind bringsLife, sunshine and desire,And on every mount and meadowBreathes aromatic fire;But over the dead he has no power,The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;And, looking over the hills, I mournThe darling who shall not return.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin
Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,it's dark to me.We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--we call it life. We know no other.The underworld's a blankand all the rest just fantasy.
Anne Carson
When it comes, you’ll be dreamingthat you don’t need to breathe;that breathless silence isthe music of the darkand it’s part of the rhythmto vanish like a spark.
Wisława Szymborska
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
Barbara Kingsolver
It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. ("Le Voyage")
Charles Baudelaire
poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you
Walt Whitman
We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.
Siri Hustvedt
When the star dies, Its eye closes; tired of watching, It flies back to its first bright dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
Barbara Kingsolver
Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.
Virginia Woolf
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
Cheryl Strayed