I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.
I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was...
He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget.
"I don't know," I said. "There isn't always an explanation for everything."
"Oh, isn't there? I was brought up to think there was."
"That's awfully nice."
"Have you ever loved any one?"
"No," I said.
I was angry and yet certain, seeing it all ahead like moves in a chess game.
"Oh, darling," she said. "You will be good to me, won't you?"
What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying.
"You will, won't you?" She looked up at me. "Because we're going to have a strange life."
She looked at me, "And you do love me?"
"Yes," I lied. "I love you." I had not said it before.
"You won't go away?"
"No. I'll always come back."
The major said he had heard a report that I could drink. I denied this.
"There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."
Then there was a flash, as when a blast furnace door is swung open, and a road that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind.
The doctors were working with their sleeves up to their shoulders and were red as butchers.
"Come, come," he said. Don't be a bloody hero." Then in Italian: "Lift him very carefully about the legs. His legs are very painful. He is the legitimate son of President Wilson."
"You are really an Italian. All fire and smoke and nothing inside."
"My God what would a man do with a woman like that except worship her?"
"You understand but you do not love God."
"No."
"You do not love Him at all?" he asked.
"I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes."
"You should love Him."
"I don't love much."
"Hello, darling," she said. She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful.
God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had...
It was as though we met again after each of us had been away on a long journey.
I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind falls.
She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light that came in the open door and it shone even in the night as water shines sometimes just before it is really daylight.
"Don't talk as though you had to make an honest woman of me, darling. I'm a very honest woman. You can't be ashamed of something if you're only happy and proud of it. Aren't you happy?"
"I've always been afraid of the rain."
There was a great contrast between his world of pessimism and personal cheeriness.
"Because there's only us two and in the world there's all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we're gone and then they have us."
"The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?"
"Of course. Who said it?"
"I don't know."
"He was probably a coward," she said. "He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he's intelligent. He simply doesn't mention them."
"I am very tired of this war. If I was away I do not believe I would come back."
"I will get you drunk and take out your liver and put you in a good Italian liver and make you a man again."
"No. We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. You never get anything new. We all start complete."
"I don't give a damn," Rinaldi said to the table. "To hell with the whole business." He looked defiantly around the table, his eyes flat, his face pale.
"All right," I said. "To hell with the whole damn business."
"No one ever stopped when they were winning."
"We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."
Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again.
I could remember Catherine but I knew I would get crazy if I thought about her when I was not sure yet I would see her, so I would not think about her, only about her a little...
"I don't live at all when I'm not with you."
"I won't ever go away," I said. "I'm no good when you're not there. I haven't any life at all any more."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "that's what I want too."
"In the spring when it is nice you could come and enjoy it. We could put the little one and the nurse in the big room that is closed now and you and Madame could have your same room looking out over the lake."
"I'm not brave any more, darling. I'm all broken. They've broken me. I know it now."
"Everybody is that way."
"But it's awful. They just keep it up till they break you."
But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
"Don't worry, darling," Catherine said. "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick."
The Garden of Eden - Hemingway Quotes
They were always hungry but they ate very well. They were hungry for breakfast which they ate at the cafe, ordering brioche and cafe au lait and eggs, and the type of preserve that they chose and the manner in which the eggs were to be cooked was an excitement.
On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the eggs were boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted them lightly and ground pepper over them in cups.
"I'm the destructive type," she said. "And I'm going to destroy you. They'll put up a plaque on the wall of the building outside the room."
The young man paid for the lunch and drank the wine that was left in the bottle. Then he went upstairs. The girl's clothes were folded on one of the Van Gogh chairs and she was waiting for him in the bed with the sheet over her. Her hair was spread out over the pillow and her eyes were laughing and he lifted the sheet and she said, "Hello, darling. Did you have a nice lunch?"
They were hungry for lunch and the bottle of white wine was cold and they drank it as they ate the celery remoulade and the small radishes and the home pickled mushrooms from the big glass jar. The bass was grilled and the grill marks showed on the silver skin and the butter melted on the hot plate. There was sliced lemon to press on the bass and fresh bread from the bakery and the wine cooled their tongues from the heat of the fried potatoes.
She slipped out of bed and stood straight with her long brown legs and her beautiful body tanned evenly from the far beach where they swam without suits. She held her shoulders back and her chin up and she shook her head so her heavy tawny hair slapped around her cheeks and then bowed forward so it all fell forward and covered her face.
She had always looked, he thought, exactly her age which was now twenty-one. He had been very proud of her for that. But tonight she did not look it. The lines of her cheekbones showed clear as he had never seen them before and she smiled and her face was heartbreaking.
"You don't mind if we've gone to the devil, do you?"
"No, girl," he said.
"You see," she said. "That's the surprise. I'm a girl. But now I'm a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything."
They ate a steak for dinner, rare, with mashed potatoes and flageolets and a salad and the girl asked if they might drink Tavel. "It is a great wine for people that are in love," she said.
"Let's lie very still and quiet and hold each other and not think at all," he said and his heart said goodbye Catherine goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye.
But he was very worried now and he thought what will become of us if things have gone this wildly and this dangerously and this fast? What can there be that will not burn out in a fire that rages like this?
You're lucky to have a wife like her and a sin is what you feel bad after and you don't feel bad. Not with the wine you don't feel bad, he told himself, and what will you drink when the wine won't cover for you?
"You're awfully good. If I didn't love you for anything else I'd love you for your decisions."
He drank the hero drink but it did not taste so good and he ordered a fresh bottle of cold Perrier and made a short drink without ice.
What was it that she had said about destruction? He could not remember that. She'd said it but he could not remember it.
He loved her very much and everything about her and he went to sleep thinking about her cheek against his lips and how the next day they would both be darker from the sun and how dark can she become, he thought, and how dark will she ever really be?
"You know I haven't done anything bad to us. I had to do it. You know that."
Be careful, he said to himself, it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
At the cafe he found the morning paper and the Paris papers of the day before and had his coffee and milk and the Bayonne ham with a big beautifully fresh egg that he ground coarse pepper over sparsely and spread a little mustard on before he broke the yolk.
"What did you do, Devil?"
The waiter brought them glasses of manzanilla from the lowland near Cadiz called the Marismas with thin slices of jamon serrano, a smoky, hard cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns, and bright red spicy salchichon, another even spicier dark sausage from a town called Vich and anchovies and garlic olives. They ate these and drank more of the manzanilla, which was light and nutty tasting.
"I never wanted to be a painter nor a writer until I came to this country. Now it's just like being hungry all the time and there's nothing you can ever do about it."
"Yes," she said. "I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again, like a painter and I was my own picture. It was awful. Now that I'm all right again I hope it still lasts."
"Stay the way you are."
"What makes your voice be different when you say it? I think I'll do it now."
"No. Not now."
"Thank you for the not now."
She can't blush again, David thought. But she did.
"People that can't blush are worthless."
"You're not afraid of him now are you?" Catherine asked her.
"Not at all," the girl said. She blushed again. "It tastes very good but terribly strong."
"They are strong," David said. "But there's a strong wind today and we drink according to the wind."
"I hope she will be happy," the girl said. "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
"I wish I could remember what it was we lost. But it doesn't matter does it? You said it didn't matter."
"Perversion is dull and old fashioned. I didn't know people like us even kept up on it."
"I suppose it's only really interesting the first time one does," Catherine said.
It was a shame a man with such a talent for disaster and for delight should have gone the way he went, he thought.
"Do you want to swim down once before we go in?"
"Just once," she said. "In this very deep part."
"We'll swim down until we can just make it up."
They kissed and she said, "Everything of ours washed into the ocean."
His father was not vulnerable he knew and, unlike most people he had known, only death could kill him.
His father, who ran his life more disastrously than any man that he had ever known, gave marvelous advice.
"The hell with you too."
"That's good. Now you're reacting better. I like when you are more careless. Kiss me goodbye. I mean good afternoon."
"So what do you and I do?"
"What we can."
"I'll put on one of my tight shirts so you can tell what I think about things," she said.
"It's terrible to be in bed together and be lonely."
"You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn."
He could not help wanting to read it with her and he could not help sharing what he had never shared and what he had believed could not and should not be shared.
I do love her and you make a note of it, whiskey, and you witness it for me, Perrier old boy old Perrier, I have been faithful to you, Perrier, in my fucking fashion.
"All I want to do is kill you," David said. "And the only reason I don't do it is because you are crazy."
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.
...he found that he still could be, and was, moved by her.
On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the eggs were boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted them lightly and ground pepper over them in cups.
"I'm the destructive type," she said. "And I'm going to destroy you. They'll put up a plaque on the wall of the building outside the room."
The young man paid for the lunch and drank the wine that was left in the bottle. Then he went upstairs. The girl's clothes were folded on one of the Van Gogh chairs and she was waiting for him in the bed with the sheet over her. Her hair was spread out over the pillow and her eyes were laughing and he lifted the sheet and she said, "Hello, darling. Did you have a nice lunch?"
They were hungry for lunch and the bottle of white wine was cold and they drank it as they ate the celery remoulade and the small radishes and the home pickled mushrooms from the big glass jar. The bass was grilled and the grill marks showed on the silver skin and the butter melted on the hot plate. There was sliced lemon to press on the bass and fresh bread from the bakery and the wine cooled their tongues from the heat of the fried potatoes.
She slipped out of bed and stood straight with her long brown legs and her beautiful body tanned evenly from the far beach where they swam without suits. She held her shoulders back and her chin up and she shook her head so her heavy tawny hair slapped around her cheeks and then bowed forward so it all fell forward and covered her face.
She had always looked, he thought, exactly her age which was now twenty-one. He had been very proud of her for that. But tonight she did not look it. The lines of her cheekbones showed clear as he had never seen them before and she smiled and her face was heartbreaking.
"You don't mind if we've gone to the devil, do you?"
"No, girl," he said.
"You see," she said. "That's the surprise. I'm a girl. But now I'm a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything."
They ate a steak for dinner, rare, with mashed potatoes and flageolets and a salad and the girl asked if they might drink Tavel. "It is a great wine for people that are in love," she said.
"Let's lie very still and quiet and hold each other and not think at all," he said and his heart said goodbye Catherine goodbye my lovely girl goodbye and good luck and goodbye.
But he was very worried now and he thought what will become of us if things have gone this wildly and this dangerously and this fast? What can there be that will not burn out in a fire that rages like this?
You're lucky to have a wife like her and a sin is what you feel bad after and you don't feel bad. Not with the wine you don't feel bad, he told himself, and what will you drink when the wine won't cover for you?
"You're awfully good. If I didn't love you for anything else I'd love you for your decisions."
He drank the hero drink but it did not taste so good and he ordered a fresh bottle of cold Perrier and made a short drink without ice.
What was it that she had said about destruction? He could not remember that. She'd said it but he could not remember it.
He loved her very much and everything about her and he went to sleep thinking about her cheek against his lips and how the next day they would both be darker from the sun and how dark can she become, he thought, and how dark will she ever really be?
"You know I haven't done anything bad to us. I had to do it. You know that."
Be careful, he said to himself, it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
At the cafe he found the morning paper and the Paris papers of the day before and had his coffee and milk and the Bayonne ham with a big beautifully fresh egg that he ground coarse pepper over sparsely and spread a little mustard on before he broke the yolk.
"What did you do, Devil?"
The waiter brought them glasses of manzanilla from the lowland near Cadiz called the Marismas with thin slices of jamon serrano, a smoky, hard cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns, and bright red spicy salchichon, another even spicier dark sausage from a town called Vich and anchovies and garlic olives. They ate these and drank more of the manzanilla, which was light and nutty tasting.
"I never wanted to be a painter nor a writer until I came to this country. Now it's just like being hungry all the time and there's nothing you can ever do about it."
"Yes," she said. "I was thinking so much about myself that I was getting impossible again, like a painter and I was my own picture. It was awful. Now that I'm all right again I hope it still lasts."
"Stay the way you are."
"What makes your voice be different when you say it? I think I'll do it now."
"No. Not now."
"Thank you for the not now."
She can't blush again, David thought. But she did.
"People that can't blush are worthless."
"You're not afraid of him now are you?" Catherine asked her.
"Not at all," the girl said. She blushed again. "It tastes very good but terribly strong."
"They are strong," David said. "But there's a strong wind today and we drink according to the wind."
"I hope she will be happy," the girl said. "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
"I wish I could remember what it was we lost. But it doesn't matter does it? You said it didn't matter."
"Perversion is dull and old fashioned. I didn't know people like us even kept up on it."
"I suppose it's only really interesting the first time one does," Catherine said.
It was a shame a man with such a talent for disaster and for delight should have gone the way he went, he thought.
"Do you want to swim down once before we go in?"
"Just once," she said. "In this very deep part."
"We'll swim down until we can just make it up."
They kissed and she said, "Everything of ours washed into the ocean."
His father was not vulnerable he knew and, unlike most people he had known, only death could kill him.
His father, who ran his life more disastrously than any man that he had ever known, gave marvelous advice.
"The hell with you too."
"That's good. Now you're reacting better. I like when you are more careless. Kiss me goodbye. I mean good afternoon."
"So what do you and I do?"
"What we can."
"I'll put on one of my tight shirts so you can tell what I think about things," she said.
"It's terrible to be in bed together and be lonely."
"You want everything so much and when you get it it's over and you don't give a damn."
He could not help wanting to read it with her and he could not help sharing what he had never shared and what he had believed could not and should not be shared.
I do love her and you make a note of it, whiskey, and you witness it for me, Perrier old boy old Perrier, I have been faithful to you, Perrier, in my fucking fashion.
"All I want to do is kill you," David said. "And the only reason I don't do it is because you are crazy."
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.
...he found that he still could be, and was, moved by her.
Davita's Harp - Chaim Potok Quotes
He shot my mother a look of disgust. She came to below his shoulders in height but met the look defiantly, craning her neck and staring straight at him until he turned away.
My mother explained words to me in a special way. She would give me the present meaning of the words and a brief account of its origin. If she did not know its origin, she would look it up in the dictionary in the bedroom near my father's desk.
It was important for everyone to know all the time that they weren't alone, my aunt said.
My room turned cold again. I saw my breath on my window and wrote my name with my finger, using the penmanship I was learning in school. Illana Davita Chandal. My name written clearly on a window against the cold night.
A quality of intense power seemed to radiate from his fragility, from his hooded eyes and hoarse voice, from his occasional cough. I found myself often staring at him, fascinated, unable to take my eyes from his face.
I asked my mother what the word religious meant.
She said it came from an old word that meant to bind, to tie.
There is no feeling more terrible than loneliness, no feeling worse than the sensation of being locked inside your own heart.
"I am a writer of stories," he said quietly in his raspy voice. "A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life."
"Along the slope grew an unusual lilylike flower. Its outer leafy sepals were dark blue, its inner whorl of scented petals were pale blue, its stem was light purple."
And once again she turned and looked yearningly toward the cottage. She seemed to be measuring the steepness of the slope. Then the bird heard her murmur sadly, wearily, "I cannot endure the slope."
A long day in the sun on the margin of the sea.
He let me lead him into the water. He shivered with the cold and cried out as a wave broke too high against us and nearly knocked him off his feet. His face was white with fear. But I held onto him and soon the sea felt warm and we went deeper into the waves and I showed him how to ride the crests, how to anticipate the swells, how to jump as they billowed, what to do when they crash and came rushing toward us in a charging cascade of foaming water. We held hands and jumped up and down in the water, riding the waves.
"I would touch the surf. His ship was on this water and now I'm touching his ship."
He kissed me on my face and held me a long time. He was tall and strong and I loved him, my father, Michael Chandal.
"I don't like boats. Boats frighten me. People I love keep going away from me on boats."
"Forgive me. I do not like to play the game of if, Ilana. It gives me a headache, and worse, a heartache. No ifs, please."
...bits and pieces of broken dreams that kept piercing his troubled heart like shards of glass.
She stood and stepped slowly out of the boat into the water. It all seemed to take a very long time: the girl rising to her feet, the boat lurching, the astonished look on the rower's face as the girl simply walked off the boat and slid almost without a splash into the water, her dress ballooning up and covering her face, her hair billowing out behind her and then closing up like the petals of a flower as she sank.
I saw the sea move slowly back and forth upon the red earth like some breathing creature of vast and mysterious dimensions.
"O Heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty; open, we beseech Thee, our eyes to behold Thy gracious hand in all Thy works..."
There was comfort in the kneeling and a sense of my exhausted self yielding to the embrace of a presence I could not understand but felt all about me as I did the wind and the sea.
"In Him is life," she said.
We went on longer and longer rides through villages from another time, past red-sand dunes and long beaches to a coast where the sea was wild. And one afternoon we stood on a cliff near stunted, oddly shaped dead trees and watched the sea roll against a shoreline of jagged rocks, saw the wind-blown swells that were the juncture of two colliding tides crashing and boiling with a furious violence, and I was awed and a little frightened.
It was a young horse. I rode slowly with my heart thumping in my ears, feeling the horse beneath me, its rolling motions, its powerful flanks. I smelled its heat and saw the quivering motions of its muscular skin and held its mane and felt the air on my face. When the farmer helped me from the saddle I felt I had grown wings for a long moment and flown.
I remember coming upon my mother in the kitchen one night and seeing her at the table, her head in her hands. She was crying. She did not see me and I walked quietly away.
You can't forget the bad things that are done to you by telling yourself that the world isn't all bad. We really can know only the people and things that touch us. Everything else is like words in a dictionary. We can learn them but they don't live deep inside us.
Nothing I write can be as astonishing as life, which is indeed the strangest story of all.
She has had two lifetimes of sorrow already. She is the kindest and gentlest of birds, the sort whose suffering is almost never noticed. We must care for her and be gentle with her.
Like all other images burned into me over the years.
Happiness seemed to dance in her eyes like tiny specks of sunlight on the surface of a sea.
I did not turn. It was like rising and stepping slowly out of the boat into the lake. Slowly and deliberately and who cares what they think or say. I could feel them all looking at me as I opened the door and went out of the room and closed the door behind me.
I only wanted to say a few words, I said. That's all.
Say them, my love. That's what we came all this way to hear. Say them. We're listening to you.
I stood there, facing them, sunlight on my face.
I began to talk.
I wanted to say that I'm very frightened to be living in this world and I don't understand most of the things I see and hear and I don't know what will happen to me and the family I love.
She smiled. My brother and Jakob Daw didn't know it, she said softly, but they were possessed of a sacred discontent.
Be discontented with the world.
"I want to tell you a story. It's a strange story. It doesn't have an ending. But you might find it interesting anyway. It's a story about two birds and some horses on a beach far away. Are you listening, little Rachel? And it's about a door harp..."
My mother explained words to me in a special way. She would give me the present meaning of the words and a brief account of its origin. If she did not know its origin, she would look it up in the dictionary in the bedroom near my father's desk.
It was important for everyone to know all the time that they weren't alone, my aunt said.
My room turned cold again. I saw my breath on my window and wrote my name with my finger, using the penmanship I was learning in school. Illana Davita Chandal. My name written clearly on a window against the cold night.
A quality of intense power seemed to radiate from his fragility, from his hooded eyes and hoarse voice, from his occasional cough. I found myself often staring at him, fascinated, unable to take my eyes from his face.
I asked my mother what the word religious meant.
She said it came from an old word that meant to bind, to tie.
There is no feeling more terrible than loneliness, no feeling worse than the sensation of being locked inside your own heart.
"I am a writer of stories," he said quietly in his raspy voice. "A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life."
"Along the slope grew an unusual lilylike flower. Its outer leafy sepals were dark blue, its inner whorl of scented petals were pale blue, its stem was light purple."
And once again she turned and looked yearningly toward the cottage. She seemed to be measuring the steepness of the slope. Then the bird heard her murmur sadly, wearily, "I cannot endure the slope."
A long day in the sun on the margin of the sea.
He let me lead him into the water. He shivered with the cold and cried out as a wave broke too high against us and nearly knocked him off his feet. His face was white with fear. But I held onto him and soon the sea felt warm and we went deeper into the waves and I showed him how to ride the crests, how to anticipate the swells, how to jump as they billowed, what to do when they crash and came rushing toward us in a charging cascade of foaming water. We held hands and jumped up and down in the water, riding the waves.
"I would touch the surf. His ship was on this water and now I'm touching his ship."
He kissed me on my face and held me a long time. He was tall and strong and I loved him, my father, Michael Chandal.
"I don't like boats. Boats frighten me. People I love keep going away from me on boats."
"Forgive me. I do not like to play the game of if, Ilana. It gives me a headache, and worse, a heartache. No ifs, please."
...bits and pieces of broken dreams that kept piercing his troubled heart like shards of glass.
She stood and stepped slowly out of the boat into the water. It all seemed to take a very long time: the girl rising to her feet, the boat lurching, the astonished look on the rower's face as the girl simply walked off the boat and slid almost without a splash into the water, her dress ballooning up and covering her face, her hair billowing out behind her and then closing up like the petals of a flower as she sank.
I saw the sea move slowly back and forth upon the red earth like some breathing creature of vast and mysterious dimensions.
"O Heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty; open, we beseech Thee, our eyes to behold Thy gracious hand in all Thy works..."
There was comfort in the kneeling and a sense of my exhausted self yielding to the embrace of a presence I could not understand but felt all about me as I did the wind and the sea.
"In Him is life," she said.
We went on longer and longer rides through villages from another time, past red-sand dunes and long beaches to a coast where the sea was wild. And one afternoon we stood on a cliff near stunted, oddly shaped dead trees and watched the sea roll against a shoreline of jagged rocks, saw the wind-blown swells that were the juncture of two colliding tides crashing and boiling with a furious violence, and I was awed and a little frightened.
It was a young horse. I rode slowly with my heart thumping in my ears, feeling the horse beneath me, its rolling motions, its powerful flanks. I smelled its heat and saw the quivering motions of its muscular skin and held its mane and felt the air on my face. When the farmer helped me from the saddle I felt I had grown wings for a long moment and flown.
I remember coming upon my mother in the kitchen one night and seeing her at the table, her head in her hands. She was crying. She did not see me and I walked quietly away.
You can't forget the bad things that are done to you by telling yourself that the world isn't all bad. We really can know only the people and things that touch us. Everything else is like words in a dictionary. We can learn them but they don't live deep inside us.
Nothing I write can be as astonishing as life, which is indeed the strangest story of all.
She has had two lifetimes of sorrow already. She is the kindest and gentlest of birds, the sort whose suffering is almost never noticed. We must care for her and be gentle with her.
Like all other images burned into me over the years.
Happiness seemed to dance in her eyes like tiny specks of sunlight on the surface of a sea.
I did not turn. It was like rising and stepping slowly out of the boat into the lake. Slowly and deliberately and who cares what they think or say. I could feel them all looking at me as I opened the door and went out of the room and closed the door behind me.
I only wanted to say a few words, I said. That's all.
Say them, my love. That's what we came all this way to hear. Say them. We're listening to you.
I stood there, facing them, sunlight on my face.
I began to talk.
I wanted to say that I'm very frightened to be living in this world and I don't understand most of the things I see and hear and I don't know what will happen to me and the family I love.
She smiled. My brother and Jakob Daw didn't know it, she said softly, but they were possessed of a sacred discontent.
Be discontented with the world.
"I want to tell you a story. It's a strange story. It doesn't have an ending. But you might find it interesting anyway. It's a story about two birds and some horses on a beach far away. Are you listening, little Rachel? And it's about a door harp..."
The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan Quotes
That was the year both our heavens burned.
Later we all realized our heavens were not the same.
Too much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow.
"You can never forget a thing. Well, let me tell you, your recollection of every last detail has nothing to do with memory. It's called holding a goddamn grudge."
I taught her what is worth listening to in this world: wind, thunder, horses galloping in the dust, pebbles falling in water. I taught her what is frightening to hear: fast footsteps at night, soft cloth slowly ripping, dogs barking, the silence of crickets.
And then I felt myself becoming smaller yet denser, about to be crushed by the weight of my own heart, as if the laws of gravity and balance had changed and I was now violating them. I stared once again at those sharp little stars, twinkling like fireflies. Only now they were splotched and melting, and the night heaven was tilting and whirling, too immense to hold itself up any longer.
Kwan said that people in the World of Yin were very bad about making appointments, because nobody used a calendar or a clock anymore. The best method was to watch the moon. That was why so many strange things happened when the moon was at its brightest, Kwan said: "Like porch light, telling your guests, welcome-welcome, come inside."
And that's when I feel the grief for what we've lost over the years: the excitement and wonder of being in the world at the same time and in the same place.
Yet I'm also afraid that the core of my being, stripped of its mail-order trappings, is no different from that of the tenth person who stands on the road wishing for someone to stop and single her out.
You can't stop people from wishing. They can't help trying. As long as they can see sky, they'll always want to go as high as they can.
"Too many years, too many years," she says, as if chanting.
"Of course I knew. In my heart, I knew all the time."
Are we born with blank hearts, waiting to be imprinted with any imitation of love?
So you see? He was already being bossy, making decisions for me. That's how I knew we were married. That's how he told me I do.
"Let him despise me, otherwise he won't leave. Make sure he is safe. Promise me this."
"Only now I no longer feel it is a vacuum for hopes or a backdrop for fears. I see what is so simple, so obvious. It holds up the stars, the planets, the moons, all of life, for eternity. I can always find it, it will always find me. It is continuous, light within dark, dark within light. It promises nothing but to be constant and mysterious, frightening and miraculous. And if only I can remember to look at the sky and wonder about this, I can use this as my compass. I can find my way through chaos no matter what happens. I can hope with all my soul, and the sky will always be there, to pull me up..."
I lift my baby into my arms. And we dance, joy spilling from sorrow.
Later we all realized our heavens were not the same.
Too much happiness always overflows into tears of sorrow.
"You can never forget a thing. Well, let me tell you, your recollection of every last detail has nothing to do with memory. It's called holding a goddamn grudge."
I taught her what is worth listening to in this world: wind, thunder, horses galloping in the dust, pebbles falling in water. I taught her what is frightening to hear: fast footsteps at night, soft cloth slowly ripping, dogs barking, the silence of crickets.
And then I felt myself becoming smaller yet denser, about to be crushed by the weight of my own heart, as if the laws of gravity and balance had changed and I was now violating them. I stared once again at those sharp little stars, twinkling like fireflies. Only now they were splotched and melting, and the night heaven was tilting and whirling, too immense to hold itself up any longer.
Kwan said that people in the World of Yin were very bad about making appointments, because nobody used a calendar or a clock anymore. The best method was to watch the moon. That was why so many strange things happened when the moon was at its brightest, Kwan said: "Like porch light, telling your guests, welcome-welcome, come inside."
And that's when I feel the grief for what we've lost over the years: the excitement and wonder of being in the world at the same time and in the same place.
Yet I'm also afraid that the core of my being, stripped of its mail-order trappings, is no different from that of the tenth person who stands on the road wishing for someone to stop and single her out.
You can't stop people from wishing. They can't help trying. As long as they can see sky, they'll always want to go as high as they can.
"Too many years, too many years," she says, as if chanting.
"Of course I knew. In my heart, I knew all the time."
Are we born with blank hearts, waiting to be imprinted with any imitation of love?
So you see? He was already being bossy, making decisions for me. That's how I knew we were married. That's how he told me I do.
"Let him despise me, otherwise he won't leave. Make sure he is safe. Promise me this."
"Only now I no longer feel it is a vacuum for hopes or a backdrop for fears. I see what is so simple, so obvious. It holds up the stars, the planets, the moons, all of life, for eternity. I can always find it, it will always find me. It is continuous, light within dark, dark within light. It promises nothing but to be constant and mysterious, frightening and miraculous. And if only I can remember to look at the sky and wonder about this, I can use this as my compass. I can find my way through chaos no matter what happens. I can hope with all my soul, and the sky will always be there, to pull me up..."
I lift my baby into my arms. And we dance, joy spilling from sorrow.
Kate Chopin
Desiree's Baby:
The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles.
"My own Desiree: Come home to Valmonde; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child."
A Pair of Silk Stockings:
A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily to-morrow never comes.
A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there. In truth, he saw nothing-unless he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.
A Respectable Woman:
His manner was as courteous toward her as the most exacting woman could require; but he made no direct appeal to her approval or even esteem.
-
The stronger the impulse grew to bring herself near him, the further, in fact, did she draw away from him. As soon as she could do so without an appearance of too great rudeness, she rose and left him there alone.
-
She knew there are some battles in life which a human being must fight alone.
The Awakening:
There was nothing subtle or hidden about her charms; her beauty was all there, flaming and apparent: the spun-gold hair that comb nor confining pin could restrain; the blue eyes that were like nothing but sapphires; two lips that pouted, that were so red one could only think of cherries or some other delicious crimson fruit in looking at them.
-
Their freedom of expression was at first incomprehensible to her, though she had no difficulty in reconciling it with a lofty chastity which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn and unmistakable.
-
Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.
A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,--the light which, showing the way, forbids it.
-
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
-
Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life--that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.
-
Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love.
-
"First of all, the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky, made a delicious picture that I just wanted to sit and look at. The hot wind beating in my face made me think--without any connection that I can trace of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. Oh, I see the connection now!"
-
"Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided."
-
As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.
-
She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom.
-
"Do me a favor, Robert," spoke the pretty woman at his side, almost as soon as she and Robert had started their slow, homeward way. She looked up in his face, leaning on his arm beneath the encircling shadow of the umbrella which he had lifted.
"Granted; as many as you like," he returned, glancing down into her eyes that were full of thoughtfulness and some speculation.
"I only ask for one; let Mrs. Pontellier alone."
"Tiens!" he exclaimed, with a sudden, boyish laugh. "Voila que Madame Ratignolle est jalouse!"
"Nonsense! I'm in earnest; I mean what I say. Let Mrs. Pontellier alone."
"Why?" he asked; himself growing serious at his companion's solicitation.
"She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously."
-
Of late he had sometimes held away from her for an entire day, redoubling his devotion upon the next and the next, as though to make up for hours that had been lost. She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
-
But the night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep.
-
She took his arm, but she did not lean upon it. She let her hand lie listlessly, as though her thoughts were elsewhere--somewhere in advance of her body, and she was striving to overtake them.
-
When the voices of the bathers were heard approaching, Robert said good-night. She did not answer him. He thought she was asleep. Again she watched his figure pass in and out of the strips of moonlight as he walked away.
-
She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.
-
She had never sent for him before. She had never asked for him. She had never seemed to want him before. She did not appear conscious that she had done anything unusual in commanding his presence. He was apparently equally unconscious of anything extraordinary in the situation. But his face was suffused with a quiet glow when he met her.
-
"We'd share it, and scatter it together," he said. His face flushed.
-
Robert was going to Mexico. She laid her spoon down and looked about her bewildered. He had been with her, reading to her all the morning, and had never even mentioned such a place as Mexico.
-
"How long will you be gone?"
"Forever, perhaps. I don't know. It depends upon a good many things."
"Well, in case it shouldn't be forever, how long will it be?"
"I don't know."
-
Robert's going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.
-
She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.
-
She had resolved never to take another step backward.
-
If her talent had been ten-fold greater than it was, it would not have surprised him, convinced as he was that he had bequeathed to all of his daughters the germs of a masterful capability, which only depended upon their own efforts to be directed toward successful achievement.
-
Edna marveled, not comprehending. She herself was almost devoid of coquetry.
-
She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun.
-
The story did not seem especially to impress Edna. She had one of her own to tell, of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back. They were lost amid the Baratarian Islands, and no one ever heard of them or found trace of them from that day to this. It was a pure invention. She said that Madame Antoine had related it to her. That, also, was an invention. Perhaps it was a dream she had had. But every glowing word seemed real to those who listened. They could feel the hot breath of the Southern night; they could hear the long sweep of the pirogue through the glistening moonlit water, the beating of birds' wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown.
-
He was growing old, and beginning to need rest and an imperturbed spirit. He did not want the secrets of other lives thrust upon him.
-
She was hungry for them--even a little fierce in her attachment. She did not want them to be wholly "children of the pavement," she always said when begging to have them for a space. She wished them to know the country, with its streams, its fields, its woods, its freedom, so delicious to the young. She wished them to taste something of the life their father had lived and known and loved when he, too, was a little child.
-
She wanted something to happen--something, anything; she did not know what.
-
...but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.
-
"Why do you love him when you ought not to?"
-
...she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said.
-
She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to took upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality.
-
His cheeks were the color of crushed grapes, and his dusky eyes glowed with a languishing fire.
-
"You know that I only live when I am near you."
-
There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning.
-
"I am destined to see you only by accident."
-
"No; I only think you cruel, as I said the other day. Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it."
-
"You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both."
-
"No matter how late; you will wait for me, Robert?"
-
Adele, pressing her cheek, whispered in an exhausted voice: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!"
-
The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.
The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles.
"My own Desiree: Come home to Valmonde; back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child."
A Pair of Silk Stockings:
A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily to-morrow never comes.
A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there. In truth, he saw nothing-unless he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.
A Respectable Woman:
His manner was as courteous toward her as the most exacting woman could require; but he made no direct appeal to her approval or even esteem.
-
The stronger the impulse grew to bring herself near him, the further, in fact, did she draw away from him. As soon as she could do so without an appearance of too great rudeness, she rose and left him there alone.
-
She knew there are some battles in life which a human being must fight alone.
The Awakening:
There was nothing subtle or hidden about her charms; her beauty was all there, flaming and apparent: the spun-gold hair that comb nor confining pin could restrain; the blue eyes that were like nothing but sapphires; two lips that pouted, that were so red one could only think of cherries or some other delicious crimson fruit in looking at them.
-
Their freedom of expression was at first incomprehensible to her, though she had no difficulty in reconciling it with a lofty chastity which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn and unmistakable.
-
Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.
A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,--the light which, showing the way, forbids it.
-
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
-
Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life--that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.
-
Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love.
-
"First of all, the sight of the water stretching so far away, those motionless sails against the blue sky, made a delicious picture that I just wanted to sit and look at. The hot wind beating in my face made me think--without any connection that I can trace of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out in the water. Oh, I see the connection now!"
-
"Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided."
-
As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.
-
She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom.
-
"Do me a favor, Robert," spoke the pretty woman at his side, almost as soon as she and Robert had started their slow, homeward way. She looked up in his face, leaning on his arm beneath the encircling shadow of the umbrella which he had lifted.
"Granted; as many as you like," he returned, glancing down into her eyes that were full of thoughtfulness and some speculation.
"I only ask for one; let Mrs. Pontellier alone."
"Tiens!" he exclaimed, with a sudden, boyish laugh. "Voila que Madame Ratignolle est jalouse!"
"Nonsense! I'm in earnest; I mean what I say. Let Mrs. Pontellier alone."
"Why?" he asked; himself growing serious at his companion's solicitation.
"She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously."
-
Of late he had sometimes held away from her for an entire day, redoubling his devotion upon the next and the next, as though to make up for hours that had been lost. She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
-
But the night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep.
-
She took his arm, but she did not lean upon it. She let her hand lie listlessly, as though her thoughts were elsewhere--somewhere in advance of her body, and she was striving to overtake them.
-
When the voices of the bathers were heard approaching, Robert said good-night. She did not answer him. He thought she was asleep. Again she watched his figure pass in and out of the strips of moonlight as he walked away.
-
She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.
-
She had never sent for him before. She had never asked for him. She had never seemed to want him before. She did not appear conscious that she had done anything unusual in commanding his presence. He was apparently equally unconscious of anything extraordinary in the situation. But his face was suffused with a quiet glow when he met her.
-
"We'd share it, and scatter it together," he said. His face flushed.
-
Robert was going to Mexico. She laid her spoon down and looked about her bewildered. He had been with her, reading to her all the morning, and had never even mentioned such a place as Mexico.
-
"How long will you be gone?"
"Forever, perhaps. I don't know. It depends upon a good many things."
"Well, in case it shouldn't be forever, how long will it be?"
"I don't know."
-
Robert's going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.
-
She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.
-
She had resolved never to take another step backward.
-
If her talent had been ten-fold greater than it was, it would not have surprised him, convinced as he was that he had bequeathed to all of his daughters the germs of a masterful capability, which only depended upon their own efforts to be directed toward successful achievement.
-
Edna marveled, not comprehending. She herself was almost devoid of coquetry.
-
She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun.
-
The story did not seem especially to impress Edna. She had one of her own to tell, of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back. They were lost amid the Baratarian Islands, and no one ever heard of them or found trace of them from that day to this. It was a pure invention. She said that Madame Antoine had related it to her. That, also, was an invention. Perhaps it was a dream she had had. But every glowing word seemed real to those who listened. They could feel the hot breath of the Southern night; they could hear the long sweep of the pirogue through the glistening moonlit water, the beating of birds' wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown.
-
He was growing old, and beginning to need rest and an imperturbed spirit. He did not want the secrets of other lives thrust upon him.
-
She was hungry for them--even a little fierce in her attachment. She did not want them to be wholly "children of the pavement," she always said when begging to have them for a space. She wished them to know the country, with its streams, its fields, its woods, its freedom, so delicious to the young. She wished them to taste something of the life their father had lived and known and loved when he, too, was a little child.
-
She wanted something to happen--something, anything; she did not know what.
-
...but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.
-
"Why do you love him when you ought not to?"
-
...she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said.
-
She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to took upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality.
-
His cheeks were the color of crushed grapes, and his dusky eyes glowed with a languishing fire.
-
"You know that I only live when I am near you."
-
There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning.
-
"I am destined to see you only by accident."
-
"No; I only think you cruel, as I said the other day. Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it."
-
"You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both."
-
"No matter how late; you will wait for me, Robert?"
-
Adele, pressing her cheek, whispered in an exhausted voice: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!"
-
The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.
William Butler Yeats
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
- No Second Troy
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- He wishes for the clothes of heaven
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you
can understand.
- The Stolen Child
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
- When you are old
And dance like a wave of the sea.
- The Fiddler of Dooney
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
- No Second Troy
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- He wishes for the clothes of heaven
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you
can understand.
- The Stolen Child
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
- When you are old
And dance like a wave of the sea.
- The Fiddler of Dooney
Roses Quotes
I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
- Emma Goldman
All the world glows with roses, roses, roses.
- Saul Chernihovsky
One may live without bread, not without roses.
- Jean Richepin
You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.
- Thomas More
They are not long, the days of wine and roses.
- Ernest Dowson
Because it is sure of its beauty, the rose makes terrible demands on us.
- Alain Meilland
Truths and roses have thorns about them.
- Henry David Thoreau
...a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
- Clive Bell
Oh, no man knows through what wild centuries roves back the rose. - Walter de la Mare
When love came first to Earth, the Spring spread rose-beds to receive him.
- Thomas Campbell
Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.
- George William Curtis
They that have roses never need bread.
- Dorothy Parker
A rose is a rose is a rose.
- Gertrude Stein
'Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
- Thomas Moore
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
- Victor Hugo
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
- T. S. Eliot
A rose's rarest essence lives in the thorn.
- Rumi
But he that dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.
- Emily Bronte
Loveliest of lovely things are they
On earth that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
- William Cullen Bryant
And I will make thee beds of roses
- Christopher Marlowe
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
- Song of Solomon
Let me bring you songs from the wood, poppies red & roses filled with summer rain, to heal the wounds and still the pain.
- Jethro Tull
A flower unplucked is but left to the falling,
And nothing is gained by not gathering roses.
- Robert Frost
- Emma Goldman
All the world glows with roses, roses, roses.
- Saul Chernihovsky
One may live without bread, not without roses.
- Jean Richepin
You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.
- Thomas More
They are not long, the days of wine and roses.
- Ernest Dowson
Because it is sure of its beauty, the rose makes terrible demands on us.
- Alain Meilland
Truths and roses have thorns about them.
- Henry David Thoreau
...a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
- Clive Bell
Oh, no man knows through what wild centuries roves back the rose. - Walter de la Mare
When love came first to Earth, the Spring spread rose-beds to receive him.
- Thomas Campbell
Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.
- George William Curtis
They that have roses never need bread.
- Dorothy Parker
A rose is a rose is a rose.
- Gertrude Stein
'Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone.
- Thomas Moore
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
- Victor Hugo
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
- T. S. Eliot
A rose's rarest essence lives in the thorn.
- Rumi
But he that dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.
- Emily Bronte
Loveliest of lovely things are they
On earth that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
- William Cullen Bryant
And I will make thee beds of roses
- Christopher Marlowe
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
- Song of Solomon
Let me bring you songs from the wood, poppies red & roses filled with summer rain, to heal the wounds and still the pain.
- Jethro Tull
A flower unplucked is but left to the falling,
And nothing is gained by not gathering roses.
- Robert Frost
William Faulkner Quotes
Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.
A gentleman can live through anything.
My, my. A body does get around.
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
Perhaps they were right in putting love into books...
Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
I will never lie again.
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
'You men,' she says. 'You durn men.'
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
You can't beat women anyhow and if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
She wasn’t too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don’t know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do.
Love doesn't die; the men and women do.
Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.
A gentleman can live through anything.
My, my. A body does get around.
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
Perhaps they were right in putting love into books...
Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
I will never lie again.
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
'You men,' she says. 'You durn men.'
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
You can't beat women anyhow and if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
She wasn’t too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don’t know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do.
Love doesn't die; the men and women do.
Carson McCullers Quotes
But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music.
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
While time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world.
The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen... Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.
Next to music beer was best.
Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? "
I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
Each man described the mute as he wished him to be.
But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all come about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house... He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted... He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun—the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it.
All we can do is go around telling the truth.
But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends.
The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.
Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror... he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith.
Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is not. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might.
There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
While time, the endless idiot, runs screaming around the world.
The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen... Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.
Next to music beer was best.
Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? "
I'm not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete. Now do you follow me?
And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.
Each man described the mute as he wished him to be.
But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all come about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house... He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted... He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun—the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it.
All we can do is go around telling the truth.
But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends.
The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.
Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror... he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith.
Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean.
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is not. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might.
There is no stillness like the quiet of the first cold nights in the fall.
All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.
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