Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
Bird by Bird
Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.
Bird by Bird
“…The man who has no love for anyone now suffers in its grasp.”
Lament
“They don’t love. They play. They’re big, cruel children and they want shiny new toys. You’re shiny and new. He’s playing you.”
Lament
I’d found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unravelling, an unsubstantial thread, sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.
Shiver
“Don’t tell me that. I’ve lived in hell for the past thousand years. I spent a thousand years wishing I’d never been born. She’s the only thing that’s made my life worth living and if that’s all I get, a few months with her- a few days, it’s more than I’ve ever hoped for. Do you really think God would forgive me for the blood on my hands, even if my soul was free? I’m going to hell no matter what happens. Let me have my pathetic hopeless love while I can. Just- let me pretend it will turn out alright.”
Lament
“If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul, you haven’t experienced poetry.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
“He was like a song I’d heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.”
Memoirs of a Geisha
Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know – because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it, it turned to dust in my hand.
The Beautiful and the Damned
For Charles T. Scott,
Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he’s synthetic – and that’s one of the flaws in this book.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ellerslie, Edgemoore, Delaware, 1927
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion, and medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
Dead Poet’s Society