The all-new quote thread

[Saturn]

Starting with a classic:

“It is my lady. O, it is my love!
O that she knew she were!
She speaks. Yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses. I will answer it.
I am too bold. ‘Tis not to me she speaks.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there in her head?
The brightness of those cheeks would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp. Her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!”
Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 10-25.

[dks]

I LOVE that one. It is a gorgeous classic.

I like your new avatar, Saturn. I implored you for help with mine--I messaged you about it. Hope you'll help.

[Saturn]

“Among her golden locks Love hid the noose
with which he held me tight;
and from those lovely eyes there came the ice
that passed into my heart
with all the force of unexpected splendour:
merely recalling it
drives every other wish out of my heart.

Since then I have been cheated of the sight
of her blond hair, alas;
and her bright glancing eyes have taken flight,
leaving me at a loss;
but, since to die well is a cause of honour,
no death, no misery
will make me beg Love for my liberty.”
-Petrarch, Canzoniere, 59 Perche quel che mi trasse ad amar prima, 4-17.

[Saturn]

“…this alone is certain, namely that there is no such thing as certainty, and that nothing is more wretched or more conceited than man. Indeed the remainder of living creatures have food as their only anxiety, a department in which nature’s largesse is itself sufficient. And the good thing preferable to all others is the fact that these creatures do not think about glory, money, ambition, ambition nor, above all, about death.”
-Pliny The Elder, Natural History, BKII xxv.

[Brave Archer]

How Shall I hold my soul, that it may not
be touching yours? How shell I lift it then
above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all-forgot,
with some lost thing the dark is isolating
on some remote and silent spot that, when
your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.

You and me-- all that lights upon us, though,
brings us together like a fiddle-bow
drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinists holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.


LOVE SONG
Rainer Maria Rilke

[Saturn]

I LOVE Rilke - thanks Brave Archer

[Saturn]

Some Goethe from 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' [a very influential novel on the romantics across Europe].

“At times I cannot grasp that she can love another man, that she dare love another man, when I love her and her alone with such passion and devotion, and neither know nor have anything but her.”
3rd September.

“Ah this void! this terrible void I feel in my breast!—I often think that if only I could hold her to my heart for once, just once, that void would be entirely filled.”
19th October.

“It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.”
20th December

The wretchedness of non-reciprocal love has never been better expressed than in this novel in my opinion

[Malia]

"Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like *struggle*. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now."
--Fred Rogers

[Saturn]

“Some hope their neighbour’s ruin may divert
His glory to themselves, and this sole hope
Prompts them to drag his greatness in the dirt;

Some, in their fear to lose fame, favour, scope,
And honour, should another rise to power,
Wishing the worst, sit glumly there and mope;

And some there are whose wrongs have turned them sour,
So that they thirst for vengeance, and this passion
Fits them to plot some mischief any hour.

Everyone vaguely pictures in his mind
A good the heart may rest on, and is driven
By his desire to seek it and to find.”
~Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto XVII, 115-23 & 127-9.

[Brave Archer]

Children have a lesson adults should learn, not to be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so "safe", and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure. Malcolm X

[Saturn]

“Lovers get less pleasure
Than pain: let them steel their hearts
To endless hardship. As thick as Sicily’s swarming
Bees, or hares on Athos, or the grey
Olive-tree’s clustering yield, or shells on the shore, so many
Are the pains of love: there’s gall for us in those pricks.”
~Ovid, Ars amatoria [The Art Of Love], 515-20.

[Malia]

"The wold needs a sense of worth, and it will achieve it only by its people feeling that they are worthwhile."
--Fred Rogers

[dks]

This is somehow so immensely accurate for me right now--and its those simple poems that can be the most violently pervading and beautiful:

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.
Langston Hughes, 1959

[Saturn]

From a film this, well a literary adaptation of Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders. I've no idea if this is in the original novel or not but it's beautiful.

"You can't tell the heart. The heart hopes. Most of all where it's hopeless."

[Discovery]

I came upon this while listening to an album called 'Shusha' by Shusha Guppy, who left Perisa for Europe before the Islamic revolution took place. I only know about her because my Dad has some of her records, which he bought after going to see her in concert in a small village hall somewhere near Preston. One of the songs is set to this poem, but I didn't know that Ralegh was also a poet:

As you came from the holy land
Of Walsingham,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?

"How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one,
I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?"

She is neither white, nor brown,
But as the heavens fair;
There is none hath a form so divine
In the earth, or the air.

"Such a one did I meet, good sir,
Such an angelic face,
Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear
By her gait, by her grace."

She hath left me here all alone,
All alone, as unknown,
Who sometimes did me lead with herself,
And me loved as her own.

"What's the cause that she leaves you alone,
And a new way doth take,
Who loved you once as her own,
And her joy did you make?"

I have lov'd her all my youth;
But now old, as you see,
Love likes not the falling fruit
From the withered tree.

Know that Love is a careless child,
And forgets promise past;
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.

His desire is a dureless content,
And a trustless joy:
He is won with a world of despair,
And is lost with a toy.

Of womenkind such indeed is the love,
Or the word love abus'd,
Under which many childish desires
And conceits are excus'd.

But true love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.

Its fun to try and read as he wrote it, but hard to understand at times.