Quotes, Poems, & Sayings...

[JakeTulane]

"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or more correctly, being loved in spite of yourself." - Victor Hugo

[JakeTulane]

"Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions." - Gustave Flaubert

[Andrew, Jr.]

Edward M. Kennedy, "True Compass":

"Some people make mistakes and try to learn from them and do better. Our sins don't define the whole picture of who we are."

[Charming Texan]

The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
and took flight through the lips and the mouth.
Farther away and nearer
still, still it came
from dead fathers and from wondering races,
from lands which had turned to stone,
lands weary of their poor tribes,
for when grief took to the roads
the people set out and arrived
and married new land and water
to grow their words again.
And so this is the inheritance;
this is the wavelength which connects us
with dead men and the dawning
of new beings not yet come to light.

- Neruda

[StillettoDoll]

"No one ever drowned in sweat."
-Author Unknown

[StillettoDoll]

"Life is short... running makes it seem longer."
- Baron Hansen

[JakeTulane]

"The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticized." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[JakeTulane]

"True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is the guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is." - R.D. Laing

[JakeTulane]

"If you are sitting in that audience ready to fight me from the very beginning, I am going to have a hard time getting to you. But if you have got a heart at all, I am going to get it." - Betty Carter

[Jesse]

Your true character is revealed by the clarity of your convictions, the choices you make, and the promises you keep.

Hold strongly to your principles and refuse to follow the currents of convenience.

What you say and do defines who you are, and who you are...you are forever. -Anon

[UofMfan]

"Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos."

[JustJo]

"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
~ Euripides ~

[scootebaby]

Originally Posted by JustJo

"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe."
~ Euripides ~

baby are you trying to say we(general) should be able to spot liars??? lol

"to raise our success rate we must double our failure rate"

[KatieStar]

I came across this poem about a month ago with intentions of sharing it, but it slipped my mind until just now. I find it to be incredibly deep and quite powerful.

How To Make Love to a Trans Person
by Gabe Moses

Forget the images you've learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.
Make up new words.
Call it a click or a ditto.
Call it the sound he makes
When you brush your hand against it through his jeans,
When you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth
And every cell in his body is breathing.
Make the arch of her back a language
Name the hollows of each of her vertebrae
When they catch pools of sweat
Like rainwater in a row of paper cups
Align your teeth with this alphabet of her spine
So every word is weighted with the salt of her.

When you peel layers of clothing from his skin
Do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient
Even though it's highly likely that you are.
Do not ask if she's "had the surgery."
Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt
If you are being offered a body
That has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel
A sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies
That come with some assembly required
Whatever you do,
Do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape
Bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue
Looks almost natural.

If she offers you breastbone
Aching to carve soft fruit from its branches
Though there may be more tissue in the lining of her bra
Than the flesh that rises to meet itLet her ripen in your hands.
Imagine if she'd lost those swells to cancer,
Diabetes,
A car accident instead of an accident of genetics
Would you think of her as less a woman then?
Then think of her as no less one now.

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle
Reaching toward you when you kiss him
Like it wants to go deep enough inside you
To scratch his name on the bottom of your heart
Hold it as if it can-
In your hand, in your mouth
Inside the nest of your pelvic bones.
Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours,
You will feel him deeper than you think.

Realize that bodies are only a fraction of who we are
They're just oddly-shaped vessels for hearts
And honestly, they can barely contain us
We strain at their seams with every breath we take
We are all pulse and sweat,
Tissue and nerve ending
We are programmed to grope and fumble until we get it right.
Bodies have been learning each other forever.
It's what bodies do.
They are grab bags of parts
And half the fun is figuring out
All the different ways we can fit them together;
All the different uses for hipbones and hands,
Tongues and teeth;
All the ways to car-crash our bodies beautiful.
But we could never forget how to use our hearts
Even if we tried.
That's the important part.
Don't worry about the bodies.
They've got this.

[JakeTulane]

"The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized - never knowing." - Jim Rohn

[JakeTulane]

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possible not yet born until they arrive, and it is only by meeting that a new world is born." - Anais Nin

[JakeTulane]

"It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses." ~Colette

[JustJo]

Originally Posted by scootebaby

baby are you trying to say we(general) should be able to spot liars??? lol

Yes dear *head pat*

[StillettoDoll]

Other people may not have high expectations of me, but I have high expectations for myself.

-- Shannon Miller

[StillettoDoll]

“When I first started running, I was so embarrassed I'd walk when cars passed me. I'd pretend I was looking at the flowers.”

Joan Benoit Samuelson quotes (American Marathon Runner Olympic medalist (1984), b.1957)