quotations and poetry

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

-Seamus Heaney

I believe I will never quite know.  Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale pink morning light.

-Mary Oliver

Circe, he says, it will be all right.

It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet.  They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung.  His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

– Madeline Miller, Circe

Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated.  I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets. This was the lesson, perhaps, that I was sent to learn: this old life was worth having at any expense.

-Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World

“Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true.” – Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists