Anne Sexton
- Yellow
When they turn the sun on again, I'll plant children under it; I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing. I'll spoon feed myself spoonfuls of heat and everyone will be home playing with their wings and the planet will shudder with all those smiles and there will be no poison anywhere, no plague in the sky, and there will be a mother-broth for all of the people and we will never die, not one of us. We'll go on won't we?
Elizabeth von Arnim
- The Solitary Summer
I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life. I shall watch the things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forest, where the pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be perpetually happy because there will be no one to worry me.
Jenny Slate
What can I do? I can only breathe in deeply. I can only bellow in a church that is deep inside of myself. I can only blast a shell-shaped horn that would shake down the oldest buildings. I can only leap for joy in my sacred inner caves and ring out the message: I am alive. I woke up again. I might as well be sprouting leaves, I might as well be covered in little clams.
Over the Garden Wall
- Lullaby in Frogland
At night when the lake is a mirror and the moon rides the waves to the shore, a single soul sets his voice singing, content to be slightly forlorn. A song rises over the lilies, sweeping high to clear over the reeds and the bulrushes' swaying to pluck at a pair of heartstrings. Two voices, now they are singing - then ten as the melody soars - around the shimmering pond all are joining in song as it carries their reverie on.
Virginia Woolf
- The Voyage Out
Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood singing in her veins, or the water of the stream running over stones, she became conscious of a new feeling within her. She wondered for a moment what it was, and then said to herself, with a little surprise at recognizing in her own person so famous a thing: is happiness.
Virginia Woolf
- The Waves
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork - things in themselves, myself being myself.
John Keats
- Guy's Hopsital
To think there is blood all over his young hands. To think that in a handful of months he will be conjuring nymphs, hummingbirds, and roses with those hands like an ink-stained magician as we listen and wonder and wonder. But meantime there is the body laid out in front of him, the heavy silver of the knife. Just beneath the soft skin, a heart beating, and he knows what each artery is named. A spirit alive in the bones and he knows what each ache means and how to turn it into birdsong.
Terry Pratchett
All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany's Third Thought said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
Mary Oliver
- Angels
I'll just leave you with this: I don't care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance.
Franklin Shepard Inc.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute... I'm getting in a little too deep here. See, the thing is Frank and I are not that kind of close any more - not like we used to be. And a friendship is like a garden: you have to water it, you have to tend it, you have to care about it or you lose it. And I miss it, and I want it back.
Pathologic
No, no... I detest trickery. But if we ourselves are to suffer deception, our hands are no longer tied. Your gentle hands are used to killing, not giving life. You will inevitably do harm. As for brainy, he has no regard for casualties at all. Neither of you knows compassion.
Pathologic
No, no... I detest trickery. But if we ourselves are to suffer deception, our hands are no longer tied. Your gentle hands are used to killing, not giving life. You will inevitably do harm. As for brainy, he has no regard for casualties at all. Neither of you knows compassion.
The Sun On The Bookcase
Yes: now the boiling ball is gone. And I have wasted another day... but wasted - wasted, do I say? Is it a waste to have imagined one beyond the hills there, who, anon, my great deeds done will be mine always?
Robert Frost
- Lodged
The rain to the wind said, 'You push and I'll pelt'. They so smote the garden bed that the flowers actually knelt, and lay lodged - though not dead. I know how the flowers felt.
Mary Oliver
- Softest of Mornings
Oh, softest mornings, how shall I break this? How shall I move away from the snail and the flowers? How shall I go on with my introspective and ambitious life?
Rilke
I want to reflect everything about you, and I never want to be too blind or too ancient to keep your profound wavering image with me. I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because there, where I'm folded, I am a lie.
Aime Cesaire
As everything was dying, I did, I did grow - as big as the world - and my conscience wider than the sea! Last sun. I explode. I am the fire. I am the sea. The world is dissolving but I am the world.
Rilke
When anxious, uneasy, and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.
Foucault
- History of Sexuality
Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a "political history of truth" would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
- The Right to be Cold
Our traditional hunting and fishing practices do not destroy habitat. Nor do our practices deplete animal populations, or create waste. That is to say, if we allow the Arctic to melt, we lose more than the planet that has nurtured us for all of human history. We lose the wisdom required for us to sustain it.
