quotations and poetry

For all that has been: Thank you.
For all that is to come: Yes!

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Another great find from A First Sip.

It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive.  It was about finding a language. And it was about being true to the fact, the one thing only followed from the other, that many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all.

– Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

I have sometimes thought that there are moments when you can see it all – and if not the future, then all that has come before.

And I think also of the gathering net Evan threw into the water, and how he let it sink, and how he drew it up again, and how it showed us the iridescent and the dark, the lustrous and the grotesque.

– both Anita Shreve, The Weight of Water

It is not a life we are living.  It is life’s reward, beautiful because it seems eternal and because we know quite well it is not.

– James Salter, There and Then

We have to take flight. It’s not given to us, served up on a pretty, parsley-bordered platter. We have to take wing. Was I brave enough to do that? Or would I be content to remain earthbound?

-Elizabeth Church, The Atomic Weight of Love