Our Own Creation

I’m going to be using this page as a place to keep quotes that I like.  I hope you enjoy looking through them.  Perhaps you’ll find some inspiration on a day when it seems like the well has run dry.  Maybe one will just make you smile, or give you a boost. Some may remind you that you aren’t alone.

To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again. ~ Egyptian Tomb Inscription

Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again. –Rosa Parks

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. –Edna St. Vincent Millay

It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses. — Colette

The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost. –Arthur Schopenhauer

In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing. –Robert Ingersoll

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. –George Eliot

A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.
— Agatha Christie (1890-1976), English novelist and playwright.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
–Helen Keller

I can be changed by what happens to me. but I refuse to be reduced by it.
— Maya Angelou

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
–Robert F. Kennedy

I exist as I am, that is enough.
–Walt Whitman

Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back- in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
–Frederick Buechner

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

When a man says that he is perfect already, there is only one of two places for him, and that is heaven or the lunatic asylum –Henry Ward Beecher (Liberal US Congregational minister, 1813-1887)

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant – impossible socially, but full-scale – and it’s the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality — Elizabeth Bowen

LUNARIAN, n. An inhabitant of the moon, as distinguished from Lunatic, one whom the moon inhabits. The Lunarians have been described by Lucian, Locke and other observers, but without much agreement. For example, Bragellos avers their anatomical identity with Man, but Professor Newcomb says they are more like the hill tribes of Vermont. — Ambrose Bierce (American Writer, Journalist and Editor, 1842-1914)

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact. — William Shakespeare (English Dramatist, Playwright and Poet, 1564-1616)

Real strength is not just a condition of one’s muscle, but a tenderness in one’s spirit. — McCallister Dodds

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it. — Maya Angelou

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded. — Maya Angelou

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first; Be not discouraged– keep on– there are divine things, well envelop’d; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. — Walt Whitman