Just Quotes (page 356)
I kissed him hard. The few people in the bar must have been thinking that all they were seeing was just a kiss. They didn't know that this kiss stood for my whole life - and his life, as well. The life of anyone who has waited, dreamed, and searched for their true path. The moment of that kiss contained every happy moment I had ever lived.
Paulo Coelho
On the beach, at dawn:
Four small stones clearly
Hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
Might there be in the world,
And how many formations might they make
And who am I ever
To imagine I could know
Such a marvelous business?
When the sun broke
It poured willingly its light
Over the stones
That did not move, not at all,
Just as, to its always generous term,
It shed its light on me,
My own body that loves,
Equally, to hug another body.
Mary Oliver
But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.
Ralph Ellison
A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.
Nick Hornby
[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor