“Memory seeks a permanent home for feeling and image, a habitation where they can live together.”— Patricia Hampl, amazon.com
“Intimacy with a piece of writing, as with a person, comes from paying attention to the revelations it is capable of giving, not by imposing my own notions and agenda, no matter how well intentioned they might be.”— Patricia Hampl, amazon.com
“Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall. Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have…”— Jeanette Winterson, amazon.com
“Every sentence is a wispy net, capturing a few flecks of meaning. The sun shines without vocabulary. The salmon has no name for the urge that drives it upstream. The newborn groping for the nipple knows hunger long before it knows a single word. Even with an entire dictionary in one's head, one even…”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“What memory is made of I cannot say; my body, at least, is made of atoms on loan from the earth. How implausible, that these atoms should have gathered to form this I, this envelope of skin that walks about.”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“Afraid of dying, yes, but even more of not having lived, afraid of passing my days in a stupor, afraid of squandering my moment in the light.”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“I also have another quality, and that is an unshakable hunger to know who I am, where I am, and into what sort of cosmos I have been so briefly and astonishingly sprung.”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“Then I withdrew my hand and she smoothed her skirt, neither of us risking a word, and we teetered there for a hundred heartbeats on those swaying branches, shaken by inner as well as outer winds.”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“The stars all have a purpose that benefits us, even though we may never see their true form or essence. They assist us with their light, even though that light—in of itself—is old, weary, and meaningless. While their precise nature is irrelevant, their impact is phenomenal. That is how I see humanit…”— Jacob Geers, thoughtcatalog.com
“Of course it hurts knowing how this is all so wrong of me, this constant need for movement, even backward”— Carlie Hoffman, narrativemagazine.com
“I was so young before New York that I believed loving myself each day would be easier there. But lying in bed, I can hear the wind, and the trees shaking because they have no choice, and I want to go someplace where the trees grow apples shiny and persistent as stars.”— Carlie Hoffman, narrativemagazine.com
“Your greatest flaw is your lack of self-control, and you will carry this weakness with you throughout your life, always a bit heavier than you’d like, a little more in debt, the self forever a work in progress.”— Vivian Diller, narrativemagazine.com
“The skin she wears may be made of calm / but her bones are made out of chaos.”— Nikita Gill, yoursoulisariver.com
“Love, as I watch you sleep, knowing the iron in the blood that keeps you alive was born from a hard star-death somewhere in the past that is also the future, and what I mean to say is that I am so lucky to be living with you in this brief moment of light before everything goes dark.”— Dean Rader, narrativemagazine.com
“The heavens call to you and revolve about you, / showing to you their eternal beauties; / and your eye is still gazing upon the earth.”— Dante, amazon.com
“The hands went along with the body wherever it went. They wept when the body wept, trembled each time the body fell silent with pleasure. Salt and regret left their mark on them. Babies and wineglasses were entrusted to them, since the hands were precise, and enigmatic. Were they light beacons, real…”— Kathryn Hunt, narrativemagazine.com