Sing Quotes (page 63)
Golbuchiks? Golbuchiks are ashes, entrails, dung, stove smoke, clay, and they’ll all return to clay. They’re full of dirt, candle oil, droppings, dust.
You, O Book, my pure, shining precious, my golden singing promise, my dream, a distant call—
O tender specter, happy chance,
Again I heed the ancient lore,
Again with beauty rare in stance,
You beckon from the distant shore!
Tatyana Tolstaya
The intellect is of no use unless it’s disciplined by the mortification of the flesh, so that it may serve the soul. That’s all. The intellect thinks. The body dances. And the spirit sings. A song, a simple song. When love and memory are overwhelming, and the soul, though crushed, takes flight, it does so in a simple song.
Mark Helprin
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Nobody goes "AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" when they sing it. Maybe because it puts the life adventure in such clear and simple terms. The small creature is alive and looks for adventure. Here's the drainpipe--a long tunnel going up toward some light. The spider doesn't even think about it--just goes. Disaster befalls it--rain, flood, powerful foces. And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started. Does the spider say, "To hell with that"? No. Sun comes out--clears...
Robert Fulghum
I also thought about that seminar classmate on Adam's ninth birthday. Adam had insisted on going to a pizza-and-games arcade for his party. The only person he'd invited besides his sisters was someone I'll call Lonnie, whom Adam claimed to be his girlfriend. Although I had often heard Adam sing about Lonnie, I had never met her, or seen Adam interact with any girl. I was afraid that he would start humping her leg the second she came in range. These were fears I'd sustained since before he was...
Martha Beck
Your soul is a chosen landscape. Where charming masked and costumed figures go. Playing the lute and dancing and almost. Sad beneath their fantastic disguises. All sing in a minor key. Of all-conquering love and careless fortune. They do not seem to believe in their happiness. And their song mingles with the moonlight. The still moonlight, sad and beautiful, Which gives the birds to dream in the trees. And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy, The tall, slender fountain sprays among the...
Paul Verlaine
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pool singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one. Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself when she woke at dawn. Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale
Life's an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: 'If there's no magic, there's no meaning.' Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It's all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there's more to everything than that, whether it's a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.
Charles de Lint