words i like

“I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love itself; and I sought for something to love, since I loved loving”.

- the Confessions of St. Augustine.

“Nothing, not even a (possible) deeper appreciation, for me replaces the bloom on a book, the freshness of the unread. Still what we read and when goes, like the people we meet, by ‘fate’”

Letter # 189 – J.R.R Tolkien

”Edinburgh lays itself open like a secret solved;
there’s no leaving Edinburgh,
No shifting it around:
it stays with you, always.”

- Alan Bold

“Faerie is a perilous land and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold…the realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm, a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but it’s very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”

- J.R.R Tolkien

“I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.”

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.

- Emily Dickinson

“I’ll tell you what real love is…It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter”

- Charles Dickens, ‘Great Expectations’

“And I too change perpetually – now this, now that – now disappointed and peevish because all is not exactly as I had pictured it, and now suddenly discovering that reality is far more beautiful than I had imagined it.”

- Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘North and South’

“The best way of being right in the future is, in certain periods, to know how to resign oneself to being out of fashion”

‘What is a Nation?’ - Ernest Renan

“We should never underestimate the charismatic power of stories as stories. Stories are precious inheritances; they have powers and meanings that cannot readily be subdued to the imperatives of a socio-economic reality. They have a shape which is intrinsically satisfying and they partake of the numinous power of myth”.

Arthurian Romance: A short introduction – Derek Pearsall

We always want more than we bargain for -
The particular tone of voice,
The special intimacy
The exclusive offer.

“To appear in your mind’s eye
Couched in glowing terms
And under your hand in dreams
Was my desire.

But reality was more of the commonplace.
I learned to stand in line for your largesse;
To ask for nothing and to look for less.

Trespass – Connie Bensley

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts-not to hurt others.

- from ‘Middlemarch’, George Eliot

‘He who shuns contact with the day, whether for fear of his fellow men or for the sake of inward composure is unwilling to eat and disdains his breakfast. He thus avoids a rupture between the nocturnal and daytime worlds – a precaution justified only by the combustion of dream in a concentrated morning’s work.’

- Walter Benjamin

“The later dreams were all of words. 
I did not know that words betray
But let the poems come, and lost
That grip on things the worldly prize.
I would not suffer that again”

- Nissim Ezekiel, “Background, Casually”.

“Most adults assume that the feelings of adolescence don’t count, somehow, those searing passions of rage and hate and embarassment and horror and hopeless, abject love are something you grow out of…: there are sharp edges on everything and all of them cut. Some drugs can recreate that intensity of feeling but adulthood blunts the edges, dims the colours and taints everything with reason, rationalization or fear”

- Joanne Harris, “Gentlemen and Players”.

“I can’t think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened and enervated”

- Sylvia Plath.

“Life has a practice of living you if you don’t live it”

- Philip Larkin.

“Life is loneliness despite all the opiates, despite the false grinning faces we all wear…the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering”

- Sylvia Plath.

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned”

- William Butler Yeats.

“Upon an ordinary material thing we can look with reverence, wondering simply at its being. But when we look upon a human face, we interpret it by what we are ourselves. And what are we?”

- Iris Murdoch, “The Sandcastle”.

“No, they whisper. You own nothing
You were a visitor, time after time
Climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around. “

- Margaret Atwood, “The Moment”.

“Still, when I unwrap the odd anonymous note
I let myself believe that it’s from you.”

- Michael Donaghy, “Liverpool”

“Some women are like that. Most loves are like that from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independance. After while, you start throwing people out – your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it”

- Gregory David Roberts “Shantaram”