[NF] Quote Thread: Express your feelings or thoughts with a quote

[oneandonly]

"These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."

- Robert Frost

 

[SD45T-2]

"Life is a series of disappointments." - Dennis Prager

 

[Lady Lazarus]

"The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket. " — Sylvia Plath

 

[Vasilisa]

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

David Foster Wallace

 

[Vasilisa]

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.

Stephen Fry

 

[Noll]

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 

[Evee]

She went out in morning attir'd plain and neat;
`Proud Mary's gone mad,' said the child in the street;
She went out in morning in plain neat attire,
And came home in evening bespatter'd with mire.

She trembled and wept, sitting on the bedside,
She forgot it was night, and she trembled and cried;
She forgot it was night, she forgot it was morn,
Her soft memory imprinted with faces of scorn;

With faces of scorn and with eyes of disdain,
Like foul fiends inhabiting Mary's mild brain;
She remembers no face like the Human Divine,
All faces have envy, sweet Mary, but thine;

And thine is a face of sweet love in despair,
And thine is a face of mild sorrow and care,
And thine is a face of wild terror and fear
That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier.

 

[Vasilisa]

I’m interested in nostalgia, especially when it’s tainted by self-deception.

Elizabeth McKenzie

 

[Flâneuse]

"However, taṇnhā, meaning "thirst," is not a chosen kind of desire, it's a reflex. It's the desire to pull something in and feed on it, the desire that's never satisfied because it just shifts from one sense base to another, from one emotional need to the next, from one sense of achievement to another goal. It's the desire that comes from a black hole of need, however small and manageable that need is."
- Ajahn Sucitto

 

[blahblahbob]

I have the first four lines tattooed on my arms:

"We live in an old chaos of the sun,
or old dependency of day and night,
or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
of that wide water inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings." - Wallace Stevens

 

[Arctic Hysteria]

“Have your dream, (Satsuki),” Nimit said as if sharing kindly advice. (…) "Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone."

(…)

“My Norwegian employer was actually from Lapland,” he said. “You must know, of course, that Lapland is at the northern-most tip of Norway, near the North Pole. (…) In summer there is no night, and in winter no day. He probably came to Thailand because the cold got to be too much for him. (…) But still, to the day he died, he missed the town in Lapland where he was born. He used to tell me about it all the time. And yet, in spite of that, he never once went back to Norway in thirty-three years. Something must have happened there that kept him away. He was another person with a stone inside.”

Nimit lifted his coffee cup and took a sip, then carefully set it in its saucer again without a sound.

“He once told me about polar bears – what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn’t take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back – literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communication – the touching of two hearts – does not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears – or at least it is what my employer told me about them.”

“How very strange”, Satsuki said.

“Yes”, Nimit said, “it is strange.” His face was grave. “I remember asking my employer, ‘Then what do polar bears exist for?’ ‘Yes, exactly.’ he said with a big smile. ‘Then what do we exist for, Nimit?’ “

 

[MrBeefSeven]

eyy lol

 

[Arctic Hysteria]

"Jenny, I am in trouble
Can't get these thoughts out of me.
Jenny, I'm seeing double
I know this changes everything...

It takes a lot of pain to pick me up
It takes a lot of rain in the cup.
Baby you gave me bad ideas
Baby you left me sad and high..."

 

[Raffaella]

And they arranged their dreams
In some other way.
And slept standing!​

 

[Lady Lazarus]

“A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

 

[ReadingRainbows]

I'm sure this has already been said but:

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

- Joseph Campbell

 

[Vasilisa]

recommend

Can anyone recommend a good book to sit on my nightstand untouched for 3 years collecting dust while I mindlessly stare into this stupid screen?

Jeff Lyons

 

[Evee]

“A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

What if earth
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?

 

[Studmuffin23]

"You lost today, kid. But it doesn't mean you have to like it."

 

[Vasilisa]

the brave memory of all

… Like birds that get used to walking
and become heavier and heavier, as if in free fall:
the earth sucks out of their long claws
the brave memory of all
the great things that happen up high,
and turns them almost into leaves that hold
close to the ground …

Rainer Maria Rilke, adapted from “Fragments of Lost Days”, in The Book of Images, translated by E. Snow