Quote roundup

Going to try to loosely theme these. This time let's call it the lines that run around in my head all the time.

Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage: for no narrow frith/ He had to cross. - John Milton, Paradise Lost (For no narrow frith he had to cross. It echoes in my head. I'm going to get a tattoo of that line one of these days).

All we are is writers, and what we should do is write. - Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald (the other line I'm getting tattooed someday)

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. - William Gibson, Neuromancer (my favorite book)

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. - W.B. Yeats, The Stolen Child

Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem - Massachusetts state motto

But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall 'the world.' Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light. - Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve. - Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Normal died. - Cole Imperi

You will die while you are alive if you don't educate yourself on a daily basis. - Jenny Slate

Grief is a reckoning with something that can't be undone. - Matt Potts

My mother was not a good 'uptown' person: she was a rebel, far more a rebel than Margaret ever was and she never was anything else. You have to comply a little bit, you know, to get anywhere, and my mother wouldn't comply with anyone for anything. - Olive Byrne, on Ethel Byrne, from The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. - Madeleine L'Engle

Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives. It is impressed upon the next generation, and is transmitted again to the children. Is that not an immortality worth striving for? - Peter Kropotkin

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote, 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better. - Peter Kropotkin

J’écrivais des silences, des nuits, je notais l’inexprimable. Je fixais des vertiges. - Arthur Rimbaud

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. - e.e. cummings

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven... - Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. - Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Would the mornings find you gay/ Never give your heart away./ Would they find you pale and sad,/ Fling it to a whistling lad./.../If he whistles low and clear/ When the insistent moon is near/ And the secret stars are known,--/ Will your heart still be your own/ Just because some words were true?.../ Lady, I was told them, too! - Dorothy Parker, For an Unknown Lady

Why in all this anger do you fill me up with love? - Dave Matthews Band, The Christmas Song