Alone

You cannot fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of.

~Antonio Munoz Molinas, "The Power of the Pen"


.credit

Time

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight....What sis Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping sown upon hollow box-lids, and rain.

~Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles


.credit

Asleep

The soul is silent.
If it speaks at all
it speaks in dreams.

~Louise Gluck, "Child Crying Out"


.credit

He sits down on a hill and sings. They are songs of magic, strong enoughto wake the dead to life. Softly, cautiously, his song rises, then it grows louder and more insistent, until the turf opens up and the cold earth cracks.

~Tor Age Bringsvaerd, The Wild Gods

.credit

Fate

Does the walker choose the path or the path the walker?

~Garth Nix, Sabriel


.credit

Alive

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

~Graham Greene, Advice to Writers


.credit

Finding Yourself

And leafing through old books we sometimes find
A dark, oracular phrase is underlined.
You once were here, but in time out of mind.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, "Improvisations of the Caprisian Winter"


.credit

Clean

So far as he was concerned, as yet, there might never have been such a thing as a particle of sorrow on the gay, sweet surface of the dew-glittering earth.

~T.H. White, The Once and Future King



.credit

Worlds

I lost a world the other day.
Has anybody found it?
You'll know it by the row of stars
Around its forehead bound.

A rich man might not notice it;
Yet to my frugal eye
Of more esteem than ducats.
Oh, find it, sire, for me!

~Emily Dickinson, Number 181, Collected Poems



.credit

Mortality

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
There was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of like,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

~Billy Collins, "On Turning Ten"


.credit