“ … ”

Pay attention to patterns.

wanderer

My mother’s favourite photograph was one of herself, at twenty-four years old, unbearably beautiful, utterly glamorous, in a black-straw cartwheel hat, dark-red lipstick, and a smart black suit, her notepad on a cocktail table. I know nothing about that woman.

amy bloom

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasing onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

douglas adams

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood and you are passing a crumbling mansion completely hidden behind old willows or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks and giant firs standing hip to hip, you know again that behind that wall, under the uncut hair of the willows something secret is going on, so marvellous and dangerous that if you crawled through and saw, you would die, or be happy forever.

lisel mueller

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

may sarton

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. All history is taken in by stones.

susan griffin, a chorus of stones

I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

jeanette winterson

If you were something else, other than human, what would you be?
A travel mug.

shinji moon

I’ve never seen any life transormation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

elizabeth gilbert

The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this, is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back from you like a wave and you can’t breathe. 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 round.

margaret atwood, morning in the burned house