Hodgepodge 212/365 - Quotes

I like to share the occasional quote on Facebook. In the past, they would show up to the side on my page—but that was many years ago, before a multitude of site restylings. Now, they just show up on my "About" page / Details About You / Favorite Quotes—and I've stopped "archiving" any new quotations, though I still like sharing them, when I stumble on a good one.

Since nobody's going to see them where they're squirreled away now (I didn't even remember what was there), I thought I'd copy 'em over here. Because I can, and because I'm lazy with nothing much of my own to say today.

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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large.
I contain multitudes. 
—Walt Whitman

We have to get through, and if we’re really lucky, we can find somebody to get through with. To share the map.
—Ron McLarty

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
 
When you have come to the edge
Of all light that you know
And are about to drop off into the darkness
Of the unknown,
Faith is knowing
One of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on or
You will be taught to fly.
—Patrick Overton

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
—James Baldwin

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.
—Ayn Rand

I'll tell you one thing: I like getting better than wanting.
—Jan Beatty

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.
—Lao Tzu

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.
—Thomas Merton

Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude.
—Paul Theroux

I wish with all my heart that every child could be so imbued with a sense of the adventure of life that each change, each readjustment, each surprise—good or bad—that came along would be welcomed as part of the whole enthralling experience.
—Eleanor Roosevelt


Your life is like a pebble
dropped into a pool of water,
creating ripples endlessly.
You do not know the end of a word,
a thought, an action.
—White Eagle

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about.
—Joseph Campbell

[Describing a performance-art piece:] It parallels those stages of attaining complete emptiness. In the end, at ground level, you are the most powerful, though empty and vulnerable. The most important breakthrough for me was the idea to go from up to down, and not down to up. It’s about humility. Our culture is so much about building up the ego of the artist. But it’s not you who is important, it’s the work. The ego is actually an obstacle to the work.
—Marina Abramović

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I am checking out my FB posts and transferring some quotes that I've included there, here. When I get enough, maybe I'll have a Quotes II post—since I doubt anybody will come here to read these before then. Consider this a pre-archive.

Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn't occur by accident, rather it is chiseled and worked into being, the product of time and distance and graft. The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning. Sometimes it happens at the most unexpected moment, and the poet has to enter the mystery, rebuild the poem from there.
—Colum McCann

I don't know if this is a dream. Perhaps it is. A dream of palm trees and noise-headed birds. This dream that I call my life comes with a message I must learn to understand. It is not in a language I recognize. Then I remember that life is not a language I recognize, and that learning life is the purpose of the visit. We are all from some other star, pretending rights when we are just seekers. I am glad to be a seeker. Glad to be reminded of how unfamiliar life is. Always.
—Jeanette Winterson

 The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

—T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (1938)

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.
—Jack Kerouac

When I write, I don't think in terms of themes — or think in any terms, really. I'm making what T. S. Eliot called 'quasi-musical decisions.' I'm just improvising and adapting, and in that case I suspect the story's course reflects the process of trying to make it. . . . . I get in a teacup and start paddling across the little pond and say, "In seven weeks, I'll land on Mars." Five years later I'm still going in circles. When I reach the shore in spitting distance of where I started, it's a colossal triumph.
—Denis Johnson

You think it'll last forever. People and cars and concrete. But it won't. One day it's all gone. Even the sky. 
—Dr. Who