I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.
I want to feel it somehow happened like that because things happen for a reason. I want to believe this more than anything because if it were just an accident, then God must have died before he could finish the world.
You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.
Could it be that first love was the only true love? And that after those first fires had been doused or burned out, men and women chose whom they would love based on worldly needs, and then reenacted the rituals and feelings of that first pure experience - nursed the flames that once burned of their own accord
The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.
Children are the closest we have to wisdom and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.
When I was in my early twenties, I fell in love at least 20 times a day. You have to be with someone where you think: if the world was full of people like you, I could not be monogamous. As you get older, you get to know yourself a little more. The older you get, the more you realize what you need. And you also realize how your choice in relationships is influenced by how you grew up. Now I feel like I've explored the dynamic of how I grew up, and I'm free to find someone who's really going to be a wonderful companion.
When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.
We see in others what we want and what we fear.
There are some lies that, under the right circumstances, are the only truth
Dreamers conquered the world long ago.
I don’t see the point of truth anymore, it causes just as much heartbreak as lying.
Life just swallows you up, doesn't it?Just swallows you up with its everyday things
Everything that we love will, at some point, be taken away from us. If I think about everyone I love eventually being taken away from me by death, or simply by getting lost from each other in the world, it makes me value them much more now. And I'm much less likely to be indifferent. For me, indifference is the end of life.
Whether you know it or not, we leave parts of ourselves wherever we go.
Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.
Love requires imagination more than experience.
But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them?...How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?
I didn’t know who she was, but I had this fire inside me for someone I knew existed.
Athens is the birthplace of modern tragedy. In the Greek tragic plays, the tableau of the characters would become a statue, like the statue of Oedipus reaching up to the Gods with blood spilling out of his eyes. I love the way the Greeks would immortalize experience. Things that all of us feel.
Even if you have loved only once in your life, you're ruined.
Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in the universe, except that everyone else is still here.
It’s the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: the history of how you felt.
I think you can love someone and be infatuated with them, too. But infatuation is immediate, while the sort of love in the West is something you build with someone. It's a trust.
Anyone who is desperate or alone will agree there is comfort in routine.
Death is the most sophisticated form of beauty, and the most difficult to accept.
Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet. It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones: The history of how you felt.
I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.
You can't put a price on the rituals of love, because you never know what will happen next. I suppose fear is part of the excitement and we can't have one without the other.
I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.
It's true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don't meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.
Perhaps we were each allotted only a certain amount of love - enough for only an initial meeting - a serendipitous clumsiness. When it leaves to find others, the difficulty begins because we are faced with our humanness, our past, our very being.
For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.
I think we keep these moments of rejection and acceptance very close. I think we carry them always, like cracked shells from which a part of us once hatched.
Love between strangers takes only a few seconds and can last a whole life.
I tried to convey to the boy how people's lives are often altered by curved lines read slowly from paper, sand, or stone.
Coincidences mean you're on the right path.
I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment - we are all defined by something we can’t change.
I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life.
Relationships break down, because it's about self. But when you take the "I" out of it and you're like, how can I make them happy, that means sacrifice. I think you have to be prepared to sacrifice, and a lot of people just aren't willing to. You have to give up a piece of yourself. By doing that, you get a greater sense of who you are. When you give something up, you need to fill the space where it used to be, and you understand the landscape in yourself a bit more.
Every day is a masterpiece, even if it crushes you.
Where are people going? I wonder what they hope will happen and what they are afraid of? For me it's the same thing and has to do with being loved.
Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us.
Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love are the same.
It's tempting to imagine how we could hurt someone close, because it reminds us how fiercely we love them.
Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.
Life can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it. Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time. We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures.
They haven't made love for years but sleep holding hands
Sometimes, language is the sound of longing
But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists—seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt. Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.
For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.
If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony; in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedrooms fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don't know then. But later you realize - that was the moment.
When somebody leaves this plane—or, if you like, goes into another room—those left behind sometimes try and stop loving—but this is a mistake, because even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.
I think anyone can fall in love, if you're open and you're willing, but the real test is sustaining it after all the excitement has worn off.
Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.
If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy.
Some studies show that we're physically attracted, like animal attraction, to people that have a different immune system to us. So even though I love cologne, it's probably keeping me from finding a good mate.
Actually, years mean nothing. It's what's inside them.
The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’re not the first to die.
I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that’s the best thing I can do in life.
The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.
In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.
I wanted to explain that trusting is harder than being trusted.
Reading reassures us that no matter how alone we might feel, there are many others - spread as wide as history itself - who have felt the same way we have, who have occupied the rooms we find ourselves locked in at various points of our lives.
Love is also a violence, and cannot be undone.
We touched with a softness that pushed through the skin into memory, like arms plunged into a river - we could feel the weight of each other's stones.
When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.
Succes is really nothing more than the record of failure. To be successful means you must be willing to fail more than anyone else.
Should you ever feel too lonely...listen for the roar of the sea- for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.
For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.
The present grows within the boundaries of the past.
Hands have their own language.
Every moment is the paradox of now or never.
To love again, you must not discard what has happened to you, but take from it the strength you'll need to carry on.
I read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.
