Its My Month Quotes & Sayings

So with a lot of difficulty, I picked up this huge snapping turtle and slowly carried it down the road to the river.
Just as I had slipped it into the water and was watching it swim away, my geology professor came up behind me. "You know," he said quietly, "that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road - you have just put it back in the river."
I felt terrible. I couldn't believe what I had done, but it was too late. It took me many more years to realize this parable had taught me the first rule of organizing.
Always ask the turtle. — Gloria Steinem

I've been on stage plenty of times, and one of the things about being a stage actress is you have a 3-month run to revisit the story nightly and play it again. — Rosamund Pike

I have an ambivalent relationship with Margaret Thatcher. She came to power in May 1979 - a month before my 11th birthday. I was far too young to have developed a great deal of political awareness. I remember it, though - my mother excited at the dinner table because Britain had its first female prime minister. — Sara Sheridan

In 2010, I proposed that Congress take its first pay cut in 77 years, and my effort had bipartisan support. And as part of leading by example, I returned 5 percent of my paycheck every month to pay down the debt. — Ann Kirkpatrick

This last month I have felt the burden of a city. Its great sorrow has pressed in on my soul. Its vice and sin have bowed me upon my knees in tears. — Oswald J. Smith

The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. A good-natured smile is forever on its lips ... I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at a sloth in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of scientific probing. — Yann Martel

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.
Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses. — Louis MacNeice

And how will I accomplish this? First I will set goals for the day, the week, the month, the year, and my life. Just as the rain must fall before the wheat will crack its shell and sprout, so must I have objectives before my life will crystallize. In setting my goals I will consider my best performance of the past and multiply it a hundredfold. This will be the standard by which I will live in the future. Never will I be of concern that my goals are too high for is it not better to aim my spear at the moon and strike only an eagle than to aim my spear at the eagle and strike only a rock? Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold. — Og Mandino

Almost Easter


Shaking bone meal
from my bare hands
into the rose bed
where only one bush grows,
I feel as if I'm scattering
my father's ashes
all over again.

This month marks
the seventh year
my father has lain
in my garden,
his ashes in my hands
still as palpable
as bone meal or thorns.

Easter Sunday,
I will hide an egg
behind his ear.
Jesus will call down to him
to get up and play.
He won't.
But the rose bush
that is turning green,
this rose will sink its roots
a little deeper in the earth
and in a few months
drop its petals
like so many red tears.

- Felicia Mitchell — Felicia Mitchell

Your brother?" St. Clair points above my bed to the only picture I've hung up. Seany is grinning at the camera and pointing at one of my mother's research turtles,which is lifting its neck and threatening to take away his finger. Mom is doing a study on the lifetime reproductive habits of snapping turtles and visits her brood in the Chattahoochie River several times a month. My brother loves to go with her, while I prefer the safety of our home. Snapping turtles are mean.
"Yep.That's Sean."
"That's a little Irish for a family with tartan bedspreads."
I smile. "It's kind of a sore spot. My mom loved the name,but Granddad-my father's father-practically died when he heard it.He was rooting for Malcolm or Ewan or Dougal instead."
St. Clair laughs. "How old is he?"
"Seven.He's in the second grade."
"That's a big age difference."
"Well,he was either an accident or a last-ditch effort to save a failing marriage.I've never had the nerve to ask which. — Stephanie Perkins

I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or month, but at an indefinite future period. — Charlotte Bronte

For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into harmony that sings back to me. — Koren Zailckas

On the 11th of every month my friend elizabeth would say, "well we made it through another month. so do we get her back now?" we always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. its not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.
we expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. we figured that we'd said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. we'd passed the test and would get back what we'd lost. but instead, every anniversary hurt more, and every anniversary felt like she was further away from coming back. the idea that there wouldn't be a final goodbye- that was a hard goodbye in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. no private eye has to tell you it's a long goodbye.
... the loss just doesn't go away- it gets bigger the longer you look at it. — Rob Sheffield

One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines. — Michael Chabon

I have come to regard November as the older, harder man's October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer's death as winter tightens its grip. — Henry Rollins

A smaller plate got mixed in with the large ones I'm working on. I'm tempted to put it back into the dishwasher by the other plates that size, but that's - that's probably weird, I think, and Mirjam is looking, so I just set it aside for a stack of its own. "We were selected early on. We couldn't make it on board sooner."
I have no idea if that lie will hold water, but Mirjam is nodding. "Gotcha. I was happy to move on board, myself. Someone broke into our house the other month - looking for food, I guess - and it didn't feel safe after that. Plus, it was cold. We had to board up the window they broke, and couldn't find anyone to fix it properly."
"That sucks," I say - usually a safe response.
"Tell me about it."
I have a nice stack of plates now. I put my hands on each side of it, straightening the stack before reaching for the first batch of small plates. There's a sense of relief when I add them to the single plate I set aside. — Corinne Duyvis

depletion and climate change. For the older generation it's easy to misunderstand the word 'student' or 'graduate': to my contemporaries, at college in the 1980s, it meant somebody engaged in a liberal, academic education, often with hours of free time to dream, protest, play in a rock band or do research. Today's undergraduates have been tested every month of their lives, from kindergarten to high school. They are the measured inputs and outputs of a commercialized global higher education market worth $1.2 trillion a year - excluding the USA. Their free time is minimal: precarious part-time jobs are essential to their existence, so that they are a key part of the modern workforce. Plus they have become a vital asset for the financial system. In 2006, Citigroup alone made $220 million clear profit from its student loan book.2 — Paul Mason

The cat's asleep; I whisper "kitten"
Till he stirs a little and begins to purr
He doesn't wake. Today out on the limb
(The limb he thinks he can't climb down from)
He mewed until I heard him in the house.
I climbed up to get him down: he mewed.
What he says and what he sees are limited.
My own response is even more constricted.
I think, "It's lucky; what you have is too."
What do you have except
well, me?
I joke about it but it's not a joke;
The house and I are all he remembers.
Next month how will he guess that it is winter
And not just entropy, the universe
Plunging at last into its cold decline?
I cannot think of him without a pang.
Poor rumpled thing, why don't you see
That you have no more, really, than a man?
Men aren't happy; why are you? — Randall Jarrell

This month is fit for little.
The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.
A red tongue is among us.
Mother, keep out of my barnyard,
I am becoming another.
Dog-head, devourer:
Feed me the berries of dark.
The lids won't shut. Time
Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun
its endless glitter.
I must swallow it all.
Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat-
Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?
In this light the blood is black.
Tell me my name. — Sylvia Plath

Into the main part of the store. Off to get Kendal, I mouthed to Celine, and she nodded. I stepped out into the September afternoon. Behind me, Eighty-ninth Street stretched several blocks to Riverside Park, a favorite place of mine and Kendal's. Just ahead the intersection at Broadway sparkled with a steady stream of cars and our neighboring retailers' windows. A man walking his dog nodded a wordless hello, and a mom with a baby in a stroller bent to pop a pacifier back into her unhappy child's mouth. A delivery truck double-parked and the car behind it honked its disproval. The air held only a hint that summer was waning. September used to be my favorite month. I liked the way it sweetly bade the summer pastels away and showered the Yard's shelves with auburn, mocha, and every shade of red. September brought in the serious quilters, those who loved spending — Susan Meissner

The contemplation of Mont Blanc's unchanging summits for three or four days last month, the sight of that eternal snow, immaculate, sublime in its whiteness and calm, was enough to restore to my soul a serenity it had not known for a long time. — George Sand

Let's talk about rape for a moment. Rape is not what George Lucas did to your childhood. Rape is not what happens when a sports team beats another sports team by a wide margin. Rape is not what happens when your electric bill is higher this month than it was last month. Rape is when a person violates another person in the most despicable, degrading way imaginable and among the myriad of terrible things humans can do to one another, rape is among the worst. I think the casual misappropriation of the concept of rape extending all the way to its widespread comical usage is disgusting even by Internet standards. Off my chest. — Jeffrey Rowland

There's progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we'll all be able to kill all the mice at the same time. — Paul Auster

If you have not guessed my name by month's end, then you shall be mine! — Edward Clodd

We usually break our records every Monday, so we'll see what turns up tonight after midnight. Next month it'll probably be higher, which is always weird. — Drew Curtis

You're going to relegate my history to a month. — Morgan Freeman