Again Quotes (page 130)
So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.
Elizabeth Goudge
Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.
Kurt Vonnegut
There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is? revolting. It's mere vomiting.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The trees are coming into leaf. Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again. And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new. Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh. In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Philip Larkin
All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling? I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie, And young affection gapes to be his heir; That fair for which love groan'd for and would die, With tender Juliet match'd, is now not fair. Now Romeo is beloved and loves again, Alike betwitched by the charm of looks, But to his foe supposed he must complain, And she steal love's sweet bait from fearful hooks: Being held a foe, he may not have access. To breathe such vows as lovers use to swear; And she as much in love, her means much less. To meet her...
William Shakespeare
You said you survived, Anna, but you didn't. You triumphed. Everything about you is a testament to courage and strength."When she stared at him, obviously stunned, he smiled a little. "You didn't get either from a social worker or a counselor. They just helped you figure out how to use it. I figure you got it from your mother. She must have been a hell of a woman."She was," Anna murmured, near tears again."So are you.
Nora Roberts
...when all the openings were closed, then the worlds would all be restored to their proper relations with one another, Lyra’s Oxford and Will’s would lie over each other again, like transparent images on two sheets of film being moved closer and closer until they merged–although they would never truly touch.
Philip Pullman