Still Quotes (page 173)
But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
Madeleine L'Engle
At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.
Haruki Murakami
My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself - not to be created by any argument. Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. So, better and worse, I went on, till I came to a little clearing in...
George MacDonald
Like everyone else, I have my black list of unfavorite authors and critics, and among intimate friends I sometimes say exactly what I think of them, but I have the feeling that to express my opinions publicly would be in bad taste, that, to people whom one does not know personally, one should speak only of the authors and critics one is fond of. I find reading savage reviews like reading pornography; though I often enjoy them, I feel a bit ashamed of myself for doing so. Still, I must admit...
W. H. Auden
What is our life? A play of passion. Our mirth the music of division. Our mother's wombs the tyring houses be, Where we are drest for this short Comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks still who doth act amiss, Our graves that hide us from the searching sun, Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we playing to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.
Walter Raleigh
It happened, as many things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it - the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress - from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoyevsky.
James Baldwin
And there came to him a feeling which he had often had before in many different places--that he himself was a part of all this, the great, blind, wistful soul of mankind, which had been here before he was born and would be here when he was dead--still groping, yearning, struggling upward, on and on--to something distant as the sun. And still would he be part of it all, through the eager lives of his children.
Ernest Poole