I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

Nora Ephron

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Willa Cather

Good habits are worth being fanatical about.

John Irving, Setting Free the Bears

That’s not fickle, that’s change.

Pat Webster

Daddy, you should have seen my knee after I fell today. It was all bloody — just like television.

John Keats Rosenthal, 9 years old.

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

Amelia Earhart

Thus, those who say that they would have right without its correlate, wrong, or good government without its correlate, misrule, do not apprehend the great principles of the universe, nor the nature of all creation. One might as well talk of the existence of Heaven without that of Earth, or of the negative principle without the positive, which is clearly impossible. Yet people keep on discussing it without stop; such people must be either fools or knaves.

Chuang Tzu

To punish and destroy the oppressor is merely to initiate a new cycle of violence and oppression. The only real liberation is that which liberates both the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time from the same tyrannical automatism of the violent process which contains in itself the curse of irreversibility.

Thomas Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence

It is possible in life to be many things at once.

M.C. Richards

I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.

Vita Sackville-West

I hate
this wretched willow soul of mine,
patiently enduring, plaited or twisted
by other hands.

Karin Boye

Whoever wants to see a brick must look at its pores, and must keep his eyes close to it. But whoever wants to see a cathedral cannot see it as he sees a brick. This demands a respect for distance.

Ortega y Gasset