I looked for that which is not, nor can be,
  And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth
  But years must pass before a hope of youth
    Is resigned utterly.

I watched and waited with a steadfast will:
  And though the object seemed to flee away
  That I so longed for, ever day by day
    I watched and waited still.

Sometimes I said: This thing shall be no more;
  My expectation wearies and shall cease;
  I will resign it now and be at peace:
    Yet never gave it o’er.

Sometimes I said: It is an empty name
  I long for; to a name why should I give
  The peace of all the days I have to live?—
    Yet gave it all the same.

Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit
  For healthy joy and salutary pain:
  Thou knowest the chase useless, and again
    Turnest to follow it.

- Christina Rossetti, "A Pause of Thought"

He did more: by his poetic appreciation he created a small world of art around her. The varieties of which she was too conscious, the honesties to which she compelled herself, even the secrets she had never told him existed inside a crystal they both looked at - not only existed but were beautified.
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

Doubt is the vestibule which all must pass before they can enter the temple of wisdom. When we are in doubt and puzzle out the truth by our own exertions, we have gained something that will stay by us and will serve us again. But if to avoid the trouble of the search we avail ourselves of the superior information of a friend, such knowledge will not remain with us; we have not bought, but borrowed it.

- C.C. Colton

We see—Comparatively—
The Thing so towering high
We could not grasp its segment
Unaided—Yesterday—

This Morning’s finer Verdict—
Makes scarcely worth the toil—
A furrow—Our Cordillera—
Our Apennine—a Knoll—

Perhaps ’tis kindly—done us—
The Anguish—and the loss—
The wrenching—for His Firmament
The Thing belonged to us—

To spare these Striding Spirits
Some Morning of Chagrin—
The waking in a Gnat’s—embrace—
Our Giants—further on—

- Emily Dickinson

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. - Bertrand Russell

There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple:

If the ill spirit have so fair a house,

Good things will strive to dwell with 't.

- William Shakespeare

As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,
And envy them - they are so far away from me!
Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.

- John Ashbery

He had often wished that his desires served him better, but in this he supposed he was not unusual - that it was a lucky man indeed whose desires served him well. - Tobais Wolff

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day. - John A. Wheeler

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop

Gluttony and lust are the only sins that abuse something that is essential to our survival. - Henry Fairlie

This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination..."unstuckness," in other words...are completely outside its domain.

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

With the help of his cane, Fierro walked home from the Senior Citizen Center Luncheon... Eating was no longer a pleasure for him; it was as distasteful as age. The pale, saltless vegetables, the crumbling beef and the warm milk were enough to make any man vomit. Whatever happened to the real food, the beans with cheese and onions and chile, the flour tortillas? Once again he did what he had done every Tuesday for the last five years: he cursed himself for having thrown away priceless time.

- Helena Maria Viramontes, The Moths and Other Stories

We need to reclaim the ethical high ground of
what California should mean. - Kevin Starr

when life is quite through with
and leaves say alas,
much is to do
for the swallow, that closes
a flight in the blue;

when love’s had his tears out,
perhaps shall pass
a million years
(while a bee dozes
on the poppies, the dears;

when all’s done and said, and
under the grass
lies her head
by oaks and roses
deliberated.)

- e.e. cummings

Apart from this purpose, he was interested in Harry and enjoyed visiting him. The old man was a clown and Tod had all the painter's usual love of clowns... He sat near Harry's bed and listened to his stories by the hour. Forty years in vaudeville and burlesque had provided him with an infinite number of them. As he put it, his life had consisted of a lightning series of "nip-ups," "high-gruesomes," "flying-Ws," and "hundred-and-eights" done to escape a barrage of "exploding stoves." An "exploding stove" was any catastrophe, natural or human, from a flood in Medicine Hat, Wyoming, to an angry policeman in Moose Factory, Ontario.

When Harry had first begun his stage career, he had probably restricted his clowning to the boards, but now he clowned continuously. It was his sole method of defense. Most people,
he had discovered, won't go out of their way to punish a clown.

- The Day of the Locust

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whosoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Because life is so brief and time is a thief when you're undecided. - Rod Stewart

Women with pasts interest men...they hope history will repeat itself. - Mae West

I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.

- Daniel Clowes