Quotes from “Letters to a Young Poet” #1

When a truly great and unique spirit speaks, the lesser ones must be silent.

No experience was too insignificant – the smallest happening unfolds like destiny. Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread, and held and carried by a hundred others.

When considering analysis, discussion, or presentation, listen to your inner self and to your feelings every time. Should you be mistaken, after all, the natural growth of your inner life will guide you slowly and in good time to other conclusions. Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which, as with all progress, must come from deep within and can in no way be forced or hastened.

In this there is no measuring with time. A year doesn’t matter; ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. I learn it daily, learn it with many pains, for which I am grateful: Patience is all!

(The Third Letter)

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Quotes – Sep 1

The idea is like grass. 
It craves light, 
likes crowds, 
thrives on crossbreeding, 
grows better for being stepped on.

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Daily Quotes – August 22

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year 
probably isn't learning enough.

— Alain de Botton

I am not one thing. I am many things that America has been in my time. 
I had enough sense to keep moving, learning, growing. 
And I have never reviled or turned my back on the things I grew out of.

— Ray Bradbury

Daily Quotes – August 19

I would go as far as to say that no book is worth reading 
if it isn’t worth reading five times, or more.

— Susan Sontag

A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader 
is a rereader.

— Vladimir Nabokov

Daily Quotes – August 13

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

— Toni Morrison

Daily Quotes – August 10

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

— William Blake, 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can.
Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.

— Philip Roth, Indignation

 

Daily Quotes – August 9

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

― E.M. Forster

Daily Quotes – August 7

In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried … nothing is so warming and companionable.

— Elizabeth Goudge

Daily Quotes – August 5

The days that make us happy make us wise.

― John Masefield