Jorie Quotes & Sayings

This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.
Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it
sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.
I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never. — Jorie Graham

...I'm insane, Jorie thought. She saw herself lying in a hospital bed, her wallet and valuables gone. When asked why she got into a car with a woman she didn't know, her reply would land her in the psych ward. Well, you see, I have this fantasy lover because, frankly, they're so much easier to deal with. She never makes a mess, loves my demonic cat, always says the right thing at the right time. I saw this woman, and she was my dream come to life, so I just had to get into the car with her because I'm an idiot... — Robin Alexander

If we will do our part and take a strong stand for our families, God will do His part. He'll help us to have great marriages and great relationships with our parents and children. — Joel Osteen

There will come a moment when there's nothing you want more than us. Together. When you're free of every fear and there is nothing in our way. — Michelle Hodkin

How can you interview somebody about something fairly technical if you start on the wrong foot by not even knowing his name? — Trevor McDonald

I would never do another sitcom. It was so boring I wanted to pull my fingernails off. — Daniel Baldwin

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven - — Jorie Graham

You fear the world too much," she answered gently. "All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not? — Charles Dickens

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive. — Jorie Graham

Love / is turning out the lights when others do, a curfew we / would take / for sails. — Jorie Graham

Soon all the leaves would fall, leaving this spot bare and brown. I felt like I was looking at the pinnacle of a particularly dazzling firework as it filled the night sky, just before it lost its shape and faded into darkness. — Penny Reid

This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. — Jorie Graham

Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills. — Jorie Graham

Where ya goin'?" Coleen asked. "I'm taking Lena to dinner, then we're going dancing." Coleen threw a hand on her hip. "You don't smell the gumbo that's been cooking all day? It's your favorite. I stuffed every aquatic creature I could find into that pot. Claws and legs are hanging out all over the place." "I'll have some tomorrow," Jorie said as she caught one of the screws that dropped from the blade. "I made pie, damn it. Pecan, just because I know you love it. Bring that woman here for dinner and save yourself a buck or two." "Oh, no," Jorie said with a laugh. "I really like her. It's too soon to expose her to an Andolini dinner. — Robin Alexander

It's the quiet, humble guy that's not saying anything. That's the really dangerous one. — Carlos Condit

Oh how we want
to be taken
and changed,
want to be mended
by what we enter. — Jorie Graham

The feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument,
a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere,
and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error,
of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set
stripped of position stripped of true function
and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection
where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing,
out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day. — Jorie Graham

There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling
without the sense that you are passing through one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,
your body an arrival
you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,
this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place. — Jorie Graham

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine. — Jorie Graham

It's tiny out there ... it's inconsequential. It's ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth. — William Anders

Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less. — Jorie Graham

During the Reagan years, government shut down eight different times under a Democrat Congress. The president and Congress worked together and got things straightened out. Under the Carter years, again a Democrat Congress, the government shut down five times. — Mitt Romney

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails. — Jorie Graham

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession. — Jorie Graham

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice. — Jorie Graham

Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work. — Jorie Graham

The way things work / is that eventually / something catches. — Jorie Graham

That," said Wednesday, driving off, "is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you're rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant. — Neil Gaiman

And angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude,
and the part of the law which is the world's waiting
and the part of the law which is my waiting,
and the part which is my impatience - now; now?
though there are, there really are
things in the world, you must believe me. — Jorie Graham

These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where "writing infects the landscape" and there are "more letters than leaves" - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines. — Jorie Graham

If I'm in a bar and I gotta be sitting next to some clown who's like, "It's my tune," I don't want to hear you belt out Bruce Springsteen. That's why we have jukeboxes! Let's let Bruce be Bruce. — Jake M. Johnson

Spirit doesn't blame for work not done. Life doesn't depend on whether something gets done or not.
Work isn't the source of happiness. Your attitude toward your work, not the task itself, comes first. — Deepak Chopra

A life well lived is the best antidote to that fatal truth. Be active, not a passive worrywart. Find magic in the moment, joy in making someone smile. Listen to a lover's sigh; look into the dancing eyes of a child you made feel special. Most of all, marvel at the wonder that eons of evolutionary time and all your unique experiences have joined to comprise the symphony that is YOU. — Philip G. Zimbardo