Ursula K Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) There is no less or greater in an absolute thing. All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it is …
Roger Angell On Death
Roger Angell (September 19, 1920 -) All the dead from wars and natural events and school shootings and street crimes and domestic crimes that each of us has once again escaped and felt terrible about and plan to go and leave wreaths or paper flowers at the site of. There’s never anything new about death, …
Stephen Dunn On Writing
Stephen Dunn (1939 -) I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people's versions of experience didn't gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself. I've since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance …
Virginia Woolf On Reading
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgment dawns — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have …
Anne Rice On Writing
Anne Rice (October 04, 1941 -) There are no rules. It’s amazing how willing people are to tell you that you aren’t a real writer unless you conform to their clichés and their rules. My advice? Reject rules and critics out of hand. Define yourself. Do it your way. Make yourself the writer of your …
Luis Cernuda On Love
Luis Cernuda (September 21, 1902 – November 5, 1963) I know well enough that this image — fixed forever in my mind is not you, but the shadow of love which exists in me...and although I know this, I then think that without you, without the rare excuse you gave me, my love, now a …
Philip K. Dick On Fear
Philip K Dick (December 16, 1928– March 2, 1982) Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.
Czesław Miłosz On Experience
Czesław Miłosz (June 30, 1911 - August 14, 2004) I have read many books, but to place all those volumes on top of one another and stand on them would not add a cubit to my stature. Their learned terms are of little use when I attempt to seize naked experience, which eludes all accepted …
Marcel Proust On Disquiet
Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871 – November 18, 1922) Come now!...Were everything clear, all would seem to you vain. Your boredom would populate a shadowless universe with an impassive life made up of unleavened souls. But a measure of disquiet is a divine gift. The hope which, in your eyes, shines on a dark threshold …
Alice Sebold On Violence
Alice Sebold (September 06, 1963 -) I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it’s not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who’ve experienced it from those who haven’t. Though it’s a horrible experience , it’s not as …
Lewis Thomas On The Earth
Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913 – December 3, 1993) I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a …
Viktor Frankl On Attitude
Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905– September 02, 1997 We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: …
Kahlil Gibran On Race
Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) Said a sheet of snow-white paper, "Pure was I created, and pure will I remain for ever. I would rather be burnt and turn to white ashes than suffer darkness to touch me or the unclean to come near me." The ink-bottle heard what the paper was saying, …
Simone de Beauvoir On Living
Simone de Beauvoir (9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) It is the knowledge of the genuine condition of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for living.
Sylvia Plath On Happiness
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932– February 11, 1963) Photo Credit: Plath, Sylvia. Bell Jar. New York, N.Y: Harper and Row, 1971. Photo Back Cover "Come on, give us a smile." I sat on the pink velvet love seat in Jay Cee's office, holding a paper rose and facing the magazine photographer....I didn't want my picture …
Patricia Carroll-Mathes On Another Lovely Day
Patricia Carroll-Mathes (January 20, 1943 -) “Thank you for another lovely day,” you said, as we drove to yet another temporary lodging. These days are hard, but you make them easier. The smoke that permeates our clothes, the darkened rooms smelling of disaster. The charred remains of two lives loving books, music, and art. Two …
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Ludwig van Beethoven On Genius
Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) The true artist has no pride. He sees unfortunately that art has no limits; he has a vague awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal; and while others may perhaps admire him, he laments the fact that he has not yet reached the point …
Knut Hamsun On Language
Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952) Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness. A word can be transformed into a color, …
Leo Rosten On Writing
Leo Rosten (April 11, 1908 – February 19, 1997) A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much …
Lauren Artress On Service
Lauren Artress Whether or not we stand within a religious tradition, there is a desire within each person to create and to contribute in a way that gives satisfaction. This is the longing of co-creation, the search for wholeness through service. This is the essence of spiritual transformation.
Anne Sophie Swetchine On Love
Anne Sophie Swetchine (November 22, 1782 – 1857) To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others.
Madeleine Dore On Solitude
Madeleine Dore I came to embrace doing nothing and relish the moments of solitude. I went on meandering walks, sat at cafés without any technology, and found myself daydreaming more frequently as I was no longer attempting to fill every spare moment.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky On Love
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery …
June Singer On Security
June Singer (1920 – January 19, 2004)In exchange for the promise of security, many people put a barrier between themselves and the adventures in consciousness that would put a whole new light on their personal lives and extrapolated on the society in which we live.
Margaret Atwood On Time
Margaret Atwood (November 18, 1939 -) You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface; sometimes that; sometimes nothing.
John Cheever On Art
John Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of …
Helen Fisher On Love As Addiction
Helen Fisher (May 31, 1945 -) If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hyper-somnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to …
Benjamin Franklin On Death
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) ...I believe I shall, in some shape or another, always exist; and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.
Frank Lloyd Wright On Houses
Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
Teju Cole On Photography
Teju Cole (June 27, 1975 -) Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. … [Photography] is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between …
