Being Me Quotes (page 176)
If. If your hand came, dead in the dead of night, And touched my forehead, waking me to see. You standing dead there in the dead of night, I who fear ghosts would have no fear at all. I'd greet you with the tenderest hello. And you would smile, though sad. And then you'd go. There would be nothing deathly in your death. For your love always was the laughing sort. That quickened life and would not die with death. And when you'd gone, I would not want to weep -- That loving gaiety would still...
Norman MacCaig
I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.
Sylvia Plath
GOING TO WALDENIt isn't very far as highways lie. I might be back by nightfall, having seen. The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water. Friends argue that I might be wiser for it. They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: How dull we grow from hurrying here and there! Many have gone, and think me half a fool. To miss a day away in the cool country. Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish, Going to Walden is not so easy a thing. As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult....
Mary Oliver
Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observatio? the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some...
Fernando Pessoa
But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word INTERFERENCE. But Christianity placed at the centre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of 'treaty with reality' could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one's soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with...
C. S. Lewis
You are the person that I should have had out there.....right out in front for eveyone to see. To be able to say to the world; Look at who it is that I love! Look how wonderful she is. To be proud of who it is that I am with. That person was you. In my self-absorbed and selfish ways, I didn't celebrate or regard you in the way I should have. I will always have regrets about that and those are the types of thoughts and feelings that have haunted me as I have sat alone in my quiet.
John Britton
Though riches had charms, poverty had no terrors for an inexperiencedgirl like me. Indeed, to say the truth, there was something exhilaratingin the idea of being driven to straits, and thrown upon our own resources. I only wished papa, mamma, and Mary were all of the samemind as myself; and then, instead of lamenting past calamities we mightall cheerfully set to work to remedy them; and the greater the difficulties, the harder our present privations, the greater should be our cheerfulness to...
Anne Bronte