Buts Quotes (page 773)
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TransformationsAll night he ran, his body air, But that was in another year. Lately the answered shape of his laughter, The shape of his smallest word, is fire. He who is a fierce young crier Of poems will be as tranquil as water, Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure Image of limitless desire; Then enter earth and come to be, Inch by inch, geography.
Stanley Kunitz
Do you like me?”
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
I did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
Anne Sexton
One had to be so careful...about remembering things. Thinking and remembering were something like walking along well-known paths and passageways that always used to lead to something lovely...but now, the same paths and passageways might end in something dead or frightening. Yes, one had to walk on tiptoe, remembering to look carefully ahead and turn quickly away before one was faced with something ruined or dead. The thing to do was to make little tunnels or thoughtways, from now to...
Kate Seredy
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" —
Merely this, and nothing more
Edgar Allan Poe
It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Having a moment of clarity was one thing; I'd had moments like that before. It had to be followed with a dedicated push of daily exercise. It's a trite axiom, but practice DOES make perfect. If you want to be a strong swimmer or an accomplished musician, you have to practice. It's the same with sobriety, though the stakes are higher. If you don't practice your program every day, you're putting yourself in a position where you could fly out of the orbit one more time.
Anthony Kiedis
Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire? and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine...
Julian Barnes