The final word is love.
–Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952)
Category Archives: Quotes
Words to Ponder #67
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
–Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1972)
Words to Ponder #66
For months they have lain in wait, dim shapes lurking in the forgotten corners of houses and factories all over the country and now they are upon us, sodden with alcohol, their massive bodies bulging with strange green protuberances, attacking us in our homes, at our friends’ homes, at our offices — there is no escape, it is the hour of the fruitcake.
–Deborah Papier, in Insight (1985)
Words to Ponder #65
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
–Anna Quindlen, “At the Beach,” Living Out Loud (1988)
Words to Ponder #64
Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
–Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts (1945)
Words to Ponder #63
The fragrance always remains in the hand that gives the rose.
–Heda Bejar, in Peacemaking: Day by Day, vol. 2 (1989)
Words to Ponder #62
The worst illness today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but the sense of being unwanted, of not being loved, of being abandoned by all.
–Mother Teresa, Heart of Joy (1987)
Words to Ponder #61
Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilerating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
–Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure (1939)
Words to Ponder #60
Life seems to love the liver of it.
–Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993)
Words to Ponder #59
Dog-tiredness is such a lovely prayer, really, if only we would recognize it as such.
–Mother Maribel of Wantage, in Sister Janet, CSMV, Mother Maribel of Wantage (1972)
Words to Ponder #58
Her handshake ought not to be used except as a tourniquet.
–Margaret Halsey, With Malice Toward Some (1938)
Words to Ponder #57
People commit suicide for only one reason — to escape torment.
–Li Ang, The Butcher’s Wife (1983)
Words to Ponder #56
As anyone with a speech or hearing disability can tell you, listening is not always auditory communication.
–Hannah Merker, Listening (1994)
Words to Ponder #55
Because the face is so changeable, I’ve chosen several quotes.
She could imagine his expression… anxiety and annoyance chasing each other like the hands of a clock around his wide, flat face.
–Helen Hudson, Meyer Meyer (1967)
Nothing ruins a face so fast as double-dealing. Your face telling one story to the world. Your heart yanking your face to pieces, trying to let the truth be known.
–Jessamyn West, The Life I Really Lived (1979)
Orin was pacing the floor with a face as long as the moral law.
–Kathleen Moore Knight, Akin to Murder (1953)
Her face is closed as a nut,
closed as a careful snail
or a thousand-year-old seed.–Elizabeth Bishop, “House Guest,” The Complete Poems (1969)
Words to Ponder #54
Each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.
–Virginia Woolf, “Life and the Novelist,” The Common Reader, 1st series (1925)
Words to Ponder #53
The religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so, but it demands a teaching which can be understood. Slowly an apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while application of that power — in the improvement of the world.
–Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935)
Words to Ponder #52
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
–Gertrude Stein (1946), in Elizabeth Sprigge, Gertrude Stein (1957)
Words to Ponder #51
Our perception that we have “no time” is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture.
–Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner (1991)
Time was a river, not a log to be sawed into lengths.
–Margaret A. Robinson, A Woman of Her Tribe (1990)
Words to Ponder #50
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
–Katherine Mansfield (1922), The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)
Words to Ponder #49
Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
–Patricia Hampl, in Janet Sternburg, ed., The Writer on Her Work, vol. 2 (1991)
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they run up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
–Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)