Standing Quotes (page 20)
But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?"Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.
Joan D. Vinge
Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone up out of the ashes.
The kid didn’t answer.
The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everbody, did he?
I don’t believe he much had me in mind.
Cormac McCarthy
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still...
Annie Dillard
Autunm eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends. From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk: then time returns to the shell. In the mirror it's Sunday, in dream there is room for sleeping, our mouths speak the truth. My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one: we look at each other, we exchange dark words, we love each other like poppy and recollection, we sleep like wine in the conches, like the sea in the moon's blood ray. We stand by the window embracing, and people look up...
Paul Celan
Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed. And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light. Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed: And love is fire. And when I say at need. I love thee ... mark! ... I love thee -- in thy sight. I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed. Out of my face toward thine. There's nothing low. In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures. Who love God, God accepts while loving...
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
When I watch the living meet, And the moving pageant file. Warm and breathing through the street. Where I lodge a little while, If the heats of hate and lust. In the house of flesh are strong, Let me mind the house of dust. Where my sojourn shall be long. In the nation that is not. Nothing stands that stood before; There revenges are forgot, And the hater hates no more; Lovers lying two and two. Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through. Never turns him to the bride.
A. E. Housman
I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds? the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both? to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us...
Anne Lamott
Why is it that we want so badly to memorialise ourselves? Even while we're still alive. we wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. we put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. what do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. we...
Margaret Atwood