Poetry, art, ideas, and the lines I keep returning to. This sits apart from the stories: a dated, living index of the work that changes how I see the universe.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver, When Death Comes
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, to raise the genius, and to mend the heart.
Alexander Pope
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Give to a gracious message a host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt.
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
Duke Ellington
There’s beauty in the unknown, and beauty in what may be.
Erin Forbes, Fire & Ice: The Ember Sword
No one ever tells you that bravery feels like fear.
Mary Kate Teske
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling the stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
I found my rhythm when I realised that even the steps backward were part of the dance.
Melody Godfred
Better to admit you walked through the wrong door than spend your entire life in the wrong room.
Grant Cardone
When I trace the windings of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet.
Ptolemy
I choose you every day, even on days when it’s hard, especially then.
Saved fragment
No one is coming to the rescue. We have to save each other.
Brit Marling, farewell letter to viewers of The OA
Impermanence does not make a moment less beautiful; it is what gives the moment its weight.
Saved note
They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.
Horace, Odes
The dance disappeared when all the machine could do was keep itself alive.
After Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Can’t Help Myself
Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Love isn’t love ’til you give it away.
Oscar Hammerstein II
Every time you leave home, another road takes you into a world you were never in.
John O’Donohue, For the Traveler
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
We must take the current when it serves.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
The whole universe is in a glass of wine.
Richard Feynman
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep.
Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times.
Rabindranath Tagore, Unending Love
Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.
E. Y. Harburg
If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear as it is: infinite.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard
I like sleeping all day and having nothing to do but read.
Hunter S. Thompson, letter dated 17 January 1958
Rivers belong where they can ramble.
Stephen Schwartz, Corner of the Sky
Satire is a glass in which people discover every face but their own.
After Jonathan Swift
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.
Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas
A change of strategy without a change in vision.
Pivot, saved definition
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
Attributed to George Bernard Shaw in Ulysses
‘I hope I’m in it.’ ‘Don’t be silly, you’re my bookmark.’
Hebburn
‘I think I can see a panty line.’ ‘I’m not wearing any pants.’
Absolutely Fabulous
It’s like a community theatre reading of a tax return.
Knives Out
I don’t want realism. I want magic!
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
Those who find beautiful meaning in beautiful things are the cultivated.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Go placidly amid the noise and haste.
Max Ehrmann, Desiderata — Granddad’s favourite poem
They have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
As the prophecy foretold. But at what cost? So… it has come to this.
Useful replies for ordinary moments
To see a World in a Grain of Sand, and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.
Attributed to Pablo Picasso in Ulysses
We shall not cease from exploration.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions.
David Levithan
The thing that makes you exceptional is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
Lorraine Hansberry
The dark religions are departed, and sweet science reigns.
William Blake
Real love amounts to withholding the truth when you have the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings.
David Sedaris
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Alice Walker
There are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.
Langston Hughes
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo
You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don’t dance. So you might as well dance.
Gertrude Stein
A life spent making mistakes is more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.
André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
Come to the edge, he said. They came to the edge. He pushed them, and they flew.
Christopher Logue