My Favorite Quotations




“Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.” ~ Osho

“She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.” ~ Mark Twain

“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.” ~  Mary Oliver 

"Hugin and Munin fly each day
over the spacious earth.
I fear for Hugin, that he come not back,
yet more anxious am I for Munin." ~ Poetic Edda, Sayings of Grimnir (Grímnismál)

"If you can believe in God you can believe in a witch, it is the same package. If you can believe in one kind of nonsense, you can believe in all kinds of nonsense." ~ Osho, Zen: The Path of Paradox

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” ~ John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society (1989)

“Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.”
~ John Keating, Dead Poet’s Society (1989)

“Magic is a two-way process: you use it to change yourself and in return, it changes you. Letting yourself enter a magical reality is not about creating an enclave of magic beyond your everyday life, but of allowing magic in- allowing for the intrusion of the weird, the irrational, the things you can’t explain, yet are undeniably real.” ~ Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” ~ Carl Sagan

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” ~  Ernest Hemingway

"If the individual has the right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny." ~ Benjamin R. Tucker

 “Trees are poems that Earth writes upon the sky.” ~ Kahlil Gibran

  “This is my Trojan horse of utility. I’m trying to get in the gates of American culture and then let poetry loose inside the walls of the city.” ~ Tony Hoagland, PBS News Hour

“It isn’t really fair to blame contemporary indifference to poetry on “Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Nor is it fair to blame Wallace Stevens himself, who also left us, after all, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem that will continue to electrify and intrigue far more curious young minds than are anesthetized by a bad day of pedagogy on the Ice Cream Poem. Let us blame instead the stuffed shirts who took an hour to explain that poem in their classrooms, who chose it because it would need an explainer; pretentious ponderous ponderosas of professional professors will always be drawn to poems that require a priest.” ~ Tony Hoagland, Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America.

“If you are destined to become a writer, you can’t help it. If you can help it, you aren’t destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn’t have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing." ~ Donald Harrington

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” ~ Allen Ginsberg

“Oh, me? I’m not 80% water. I’m 80% coffee, and a little bit of sass.” ~ Zooey Deschanel

“How fragile we are, between the few good moments.” ~ Jane Hirshfield, Vinegar and Oil

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." ~ Roald Dahl

“máni þat né vissi
hvat hann megins átti.
[The moon knew not what might was his]” ~ The Poetic Edda (Völuspá)

"Be the leaf." ~ Meelo, The Legend of Korra

“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.” ~ Rumi

“How are you holding up? Because I’m a potato.” ~ GLaDOS (Portal 2)

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Road Goes Ever On; The Hobbit

“You think this wise, boy? Crossing blades with a pirate?” ~ Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

“Magic is real. And reality… it is magical.” ~ Aleister Crowley

“Here’s another curse for you — may all your bacon burn.” ~ Calcifer, Howl’s Moving Castle

“I think there’s probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.” ~ Oliver Sacks, (NPR Interview)

 “Life begins where fear ends.” ~ Osho

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“I am by nature a dealer of words, and words are the most powerful drugs known to humanity.” ~ Rudyard Kipling

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.” ~ Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“When I first met you, I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time, you are running away for all you’re worth.” ~ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep.” ~ Frodo Baggins, The Return of the King

“The one thing you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and dance and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked.. that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.” ~ Neil Gaiman

“Right now, I’m following the Buddhist principle: Smile as abuse is hurled your way and this too shall pass.” ~ Aishwarya Rai

“Witchcraft is you acting on your behalf with the power of the universe.” ~ C. Schumacher

“She’s mad but she’s magic. There’s no lie in her fire.” ~ Charles Bukowski

"But she was not willing to be parted from him again, saying ‘You must choose, Beren, between these two: to relinquish the quest and your oath and seek a life of wandering upon the face of the earth; or to hold to your word and challenge the power of darkness upon its throne. But on either road I shall go with you, and our doom shall be alike.’" ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Of Beren and Lúthien

“We sit and talk quietly,
with long lapses of silence,
and I am aware of the stream that has no language,
coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.” ~ William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“There’s nothing wrong with delighting in what you do. In fact, most of the fun you’ll have as a poet will come about during the process of writing.” ~ Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual

“One leaf
too tired to fall
clings
and in its clinging waves
and in its waving wants
all it sees and will not have.” ~ Phillip Pardi, Under Hemlocks (Meditations on Rising and Falling)

“Sleep is good and books are better.” ~ George R.R. Martin

“No man is so good that he has no flaw,
Nor so bad that he’s good for nothing." ~ The Poetic Edda: Hávamál

“If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.” ~ C.S. Lewis

“You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.” ~ Catherynne M. Valente

“The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.” ~ Caroline Myss

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

“‘If the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you?’ No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody.” ~  F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I said never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn’t apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn’t say sorry for falling. Feelings just are.” ~ Iain S. Thomas, Intentional Dissonance

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.” ~ Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight, the weight we carry is love.” ~ Allen Ginsberg

“If you do not compare yourself with another you will be what you really are.” ~ Krishnamurti

“Twenty years from now you’ll be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do… Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ~ Mark Twain

“So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.” ~ Rumi

“Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“Don’t sit and wait. Get out there, feel life. Touch the sun, and immerse in the sea.” ~ Rumi

“Life is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.” ~ Virginia Satir
“You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars” ~ Anaïs Nin“You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. So let them go, let go of them. I tie no weights to my ankles.” ~ C. JoyBell C.

“The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person’s soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.” ~ Keith Miller

“But you know happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light.” ~ Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit." ~ E.E. Cummings

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.” ~ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.” ~ Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“We are never so vulnerable as when we love.” ~ Sigmund Freud

"Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused." ~ Alan Cohen

“Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

"Do not be afraid. Trust in who you are. Trust in what will be." ~ Balinor (via Merlin S5 Ep.12)


"When they ask to see your gods
your book of prayers
show them lines
drawn delicately with veins
on the underside of a bird's wing
tell them you believe
in giant sycamores mottled
and stark against a winter sky
and in nights so frozen
stars crack open spilling
streams of molten ice to earth
and tell them how you drink
a holy wine of honeysuckle
on a warm spring day
and of the softness
of your mother who never taught you
death was life's reward
but who believed in the earth
and the sun
and a million, million light years
of being" ~ J.L. Stanley, Catechism for a Witch's Child

"Let yourself be drawn by the strange pull of what you love. It will not lead you astray." ~ Rumi

“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.” ~ Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi

“You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, “This is the real me,” and when you have found that attitude, follow it.” ~ William James

“Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” ~ Rumi

“Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they’re born.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Beautiful and Damned"

"Keep Writing, and hope that someone publishes your shit." ~ Jon Chopan @ The Living Writer's Series, SUNY Oswego 9/18/12

“And so being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

"Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf." ~ Mark Strand

"Hear my soul speak:
The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service." ~ Shakespeare (The Tempest, via Ferdinand, Act 3, Scene 1.)“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.” ~ Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

“Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?” ~ Shakespeare [Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3]

“When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person,not the shell. That’s why you can’t fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and body but not your heart. And that’s why, when you really connect with a person’s inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant.” ~  Lisa Unger (Beautiful Lies)

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” ~ C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

"Your heart and mine were as one, however briefly..." ~ Zelda, via The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

“You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.” ~ J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.” ~ Jamie Tworkowski

“You cannot change the way someone else feels if their mind is set or their past has a hold of them. Until they want it for themselves, you have to “let it be.” Be brave, be gentle, and set yourself free.” ~ Katie Curran Taylor

“Nothing is lost...Everything is transformed.” ~ Michael Ende (The Never Ending Story)

“Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.” ~ Marc Hack

"if nothing else,
know this:
i will break
all the promises
i never made to you." ~ ifyourbonesareheavythings.tumblr.com (2012)

“There are worlds within worlds, Crysta. Everything in our world is connected by the delicate strands of the web of life, which is a balance between the forces of destruction and the magical forces of creation.” ~ Magi Lune, Fern Gully

“You are terrifying and strange and beautiful, someone not everyone knows how to love.” ~ Warsan Shire

“I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.” ~ Haruki Murakami

“A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we’re two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we’ve found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.” ~ Richard Bach

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.” ~ John Marsden, The Dead of Night

“A book can teach you, a conversation can assure you, a poem can seduce you, a genius can inspire you but only you can save yourself.” ~ Anthony Anaxagorou

“His body smelled like a precious-wood forest; his hair, like sandalwood, his skin, like cedar. It was as if he had always lived among trees and plants.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The Elven King looked at Bilbo with new wonder. ‘Bilbo Baggins!’ he said. ‘You are more worthy to wear the armor of elf-princes than many who have looked more comely in it. But I wonder if Thorin Oakenshield will see it so. I have more knowledge of dwarves in general than you have perhaps. I advise you to remain with us, and here you shall be honored and thrice welcome.’” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“1. Learn to know them. Watch their facial expressions, watch the way their body twists and bends. Notice the freckles along their noses, their arms, their back. Listen to their laughter, listen to the way their voice cracks when they’re upset. Find their weakness, their broken points, their darkness. Find their light. Find the things unique to them. Ask them about their childhood, ask them about their favorite place to read, ask them what their last words would be if they could choose. Know them.

2. Let these things blossom beneath their skin like flowers, like bruises, so every time you see them, it will be a reminder. Let those bruises shine like moons in every phase and the smaller things shine like stars. They are your night sky, and you are the astronomer.

3. Show them the constellations you have found and let them find a glowing world beneath their skin. Ask them to read you their favorite poem or sing you their favorite song. Learn to love their passion for whatever it is they enjoy. Learn to love their shooting stars.” ~ Kelsey Danielle, “How to Love Someone”

“Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it’s all one. It’s one energy. It comes through in individual ways, but it’s one energy. You can call it energy, or you can call it love. I like to look at a tree and see that it’s love. Don’t you?” ~ Ram Dass

“Within each experience of pain or negativity is the opportunity to challenge the perception that lies behind it, the fear that lies behind it, and choose to learn with wisdom. The fear will not vanish immediately, but it will disintegrate as you work with courage. When fear ceases to scare you, it cannot stay. When you choose to learn through wisdom, to evolve consciously, your fears surface one at a time in order for you to exorcise them with inner faith. This is how it happens. You exorcise your own demons.” ~ Gary Zukav, The Seat of the Soul

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ~ C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” ~ George Orwell, 1984

“(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” ~ Mary Oliver, The Uses of Sorrow

“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.” ~ Erin Bow

“And when I asked you how you’d been, I meant I missed you more than I’ve ever missed anything before.” ~ Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You

“Seduce me. Write letters to me. And poems, I love poems. Ravish me with your words. Seduce me.” ~ Anne Boleyn

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” ~ Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

“‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.” ~ David Nicholls, One Day

“I like getting testimonials which say I’m gifted. Who doesn’t? But if I’m being really honest, I’m not gifted in the sense of ‘I’m one of the few people who has this gift’. I’m not more gifted than you. We all have that connection to Spirit if we want it to exist and if we believe it can. I am just someone who took the risk of believing, in spite of a big nasty side of me which told me I was an idiot.” ~ Anna Sayce

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” ~ Neruda

“Finding your passion isn’t just about careers and money. It’s about finding your authentic self. The one you’ve buried beneath other people’s needs.” ~ Kristin Hannah, Distant Shores

“The poem is the device through which the ordinary world is seen in a new way – engaging, compelling, even beautiful.” ~ Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual

“True magic is neither black, nor white - it is both because nature is both. Loving and cruel, all at the same time. The only good or bad is in the heart of the witch.” ~ Anonymous

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