Quotes, Poems, & Sayings...

[Trev]

“Life itself is simple...it's just not easy.”
― Steve Maraboli


“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

[Kobi]

[Jesse]

For My Daughter

By Sarah McMane
“Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.”

– Clementine Paddleford


Never play the princess when you can
be the queen:
rule the kingdom, swing a scepter,
wear a crown of gold.
Don’t dance in glass slippers,
crystal carving up your toes --
be a barefoot Amazon instead,
for those shoes will surely shatter on your feet.
Never wear only pink
when you can strut in crimson red,
sweat in heather grey, and
shimmer in sky blue,
claim the golden sun upon your hair.
Colors are for everyone,
boys and girls, men and women --
be a verdant garden, the landscape of Versailles,
not a pale primrose blindly pushed aside.
Chase green dragons and one-eyed zombies,
fierce and fiery toothy monsters,
not merely lazy butterflies,
sweet and slow on summer days.
For you can tame the most brutish beasts
with your wily wits and charm,
and lizard scales feel just as smooth
as gossamer insect wings.
Tramp muddy through the house in
a purple tutu and cowboy boots.
Have a tea party in your overalls.
Build a fort of birch branches,
a zoo of Legos, a rocketship of
Queen Anne chairs and coverlets,
first stop on the moon.
Dream of dinosaurs and baby dolls,
bold brontosaurus and bookish Belle,
not Barbie on the runway or
Disney damsels in distress --
you are much too strong to play
the simpering waif.
Don a baseball cap, dance with Daddy,
paint your toenails, climb a cottonwood.
Learn to speak with both your mind and heart.
For the ground beneath will hold you, dear --
know that you are free.
And never grow a wishbone, daughter,
where your backbone ought to be.

[Smiling]

A Late Walk

When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words

A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

Robert Frost

[Trev]

[Genesis]

[Genesis]

[Trev]

[Genesis]

[Smiling]

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud


I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth

[Bèsame*]

[Bèsame*]

[Jesse]

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”― F. Scott Fitzgerald

[deathbypoem]

The Peace of Wild Things




When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~Wendell Berry

[deathbypoem]

“Wouldn’t it be fine if we could prove things with our mind, and know for certain that things are always in their place. I’d like to know what a place is like when I’m not there. I’d like to be sure.”



~ Ray Bradbury~ "The Illustrated Man"


(btw, great book)

[deathbypoem]

"All these years, all these memories, there was you. You pulled me through time."

from the movie "The Fountain"

[deathbypoem]

I would go to hell to find you.~ What Dreams May Come

[Smiling]

My Love Reveals Objects


My love reveals objects
silken butterflies
concealed in his fingers

his words
splash me with stars

night shines like lightning
under the fingers of my love

My love invents worlds where
jeweled glittering serpents live

worlds where music is the world

worlds where houses with open eyes
contemplate the dawn

My love is a mad sunflower that forgets
fragments of sun in the silence

Isabel Fraire

[Talon]

I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair.
I hate the way you drive my car. I hate it when you stare.
I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind.
I hate you so much it makes me sick, it even makes me rhyme.
I hate the way you always think you're right, I hate it when you lie.
I hate it when you make me laugh, I hate you worse when you make me cry.
I hate it when you're not around, and the fact that you didn't call.
But most of all I hate the way that I don't hate you. Not even close,
not a little bit, not even at all.



~ Ten things I Hate About You

[Genesis]

First there was Helen of Sparta, who did it only
with oil, no one knows how; then there was
Maggie of England, who even on the battlefield
put men back together; and then there was Rose
of the deepest South, who stood up in her father’s
clothes and walked out of the house and herself.

Disguised women were always among them.
They badly wanted to wear blue, they badly
wanted to wear red, they wanted to blend
with the woods or ground. Together
with men they were blown from their pronouns.
Their faces too were shot off which were then
free of their bodies. “I never had any dolls I only
had soldiers. I played soldier from the minute
I was born. Dropped my voice down almost
into the earth, wore bandages where I didn’t
need them, was finally discovered by the doctor,
was finally discovered at the end.”

Someone thought long and hard how to best
make my brother blend into the sand. He came
back and he was heaped up himself like a dune,
he was twice the size of me, his sight glittered
deeper in the family head, he hid among himself,
and slid, and stormed, and looked the same
as the next one, and was hot and gold and some-
where else.

My brother reached out his hand to me and said,
“They should not be over there. Women should not
be over there.” He said, “I watched people burn
to death. They burned to death in front of me.”
A week later his red-haired friend killed himself.
And even his name was a boy’s name: Andrew.

A friend writes to him, “My dress blues are being
altered for a bloodstripe.” That’s a beautiful line,
I can’t help hearing. “Kisses,” he writes to a friend.
His friend he writes back, “Cuddles.” Bunch of girls,
bunch of girls. They write each other, “Miss you,
brother.” Bunch of girls, bunch of girls. They passed
the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches
together. They lost their hearts to local dogs,
what a bunch of girls.

I sent my brother nothing in the desert because
I was busy writing poems. Deciding one by one
where the breath commas went, or else it would
not stand and walk. This was going to be a poem
about release from the body. This was going
to be a poem about someone else, maybe even me.

My brother is alive because of a family capacity
for little hairs rising on the back of the neck.
The night the roadside bomb blew up, all three
sisters dreamed of him. There, I just felt it,
the family capacity. My brother is alive because
the family head sometimes hears a little voice.

I had been writing the poem before the boy died.
It then did not seem right to mention that burn means
different things in different bodies. I was going
to end the poem with a line about the grass. But
they were in the desert, and I was in the desert when
I thought about them, and no new ending appeared
to me. I was going to write, “The hill that they died on
was often a woman, wearing the greatest uniform of war,
which is grass.” I know my little brother’s head. The scalp
is almost green, where the hair is shortest. I know
my little brother’s head, and that is where the ending
lives, the one that sends the poem home, and makes grass
stand up on the back of the neck, and fits so beautiful
no one can breathe—the last words live
in the family head, and let them live in there a while.