Timely Quotes (page 705)
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The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but incredible fabrications. I have stayed alive all these years clinging to the frail hope that these memories of mine were nothing but a dream or a delusion. I have struggled to convince myself that they never happened. But each time I tried to push them into the dark, they came back stronger...
Haruki Murakami
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud. And goes down burning into the gulf below, No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud. At what has happened. Birds, at least must know. It is the change to darkness in the sky. Murmuring something quiet in her breast, One bird begins to close a faded eye; Or overtaken too far from his nest, Hurrying low above the grove, some waif. Swoops just in time to his remembered tree. At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe! Now let the night be dark for...
Robert Frost
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet. When far away an interrupted cry. Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, A luminary clock against the sky. Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.
Robert Frost
Dear God...let me be something every minutes of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere--be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost." - A Tree Grows in BrooklynEdit
Betty Smith
Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.
Martin Amis
It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one's time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay -- a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory.
Barry Lopez