Chris Gager > Chris's Quotes

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“Red was the color of the sun's most beautiful throne
and all the other colors prayed on red rugs.
...
I still follow the child
who still walks inside me.”
― Adonis "Celebrating Childhood"

“And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out...”
― W. B. Yeats - The Song of the Wandering Aengus"

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

“Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.”
― Joseph Conrad, An Outpost of Progress

“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;...”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us naught but grief an' pain
For promised joy!

Still thou art blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:”
― Robert Burns, Collected Poems of Robert Burns

“Loveliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“Away

There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share.
See the sweet sun shines
The shower is over;
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love, on duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.”
― Walter de la Mare

“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream

“Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.”
― Richard Hughes

“... nobody does anything for nothing. ... it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“La tristesse durera toujours.
[The sadness will last forever.]”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.”
― William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories

“In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness

“No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.”
― Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King.”
― Emily Dickinson

“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath.”
― Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart Collector's Edition