Pastan Quotes & Sayings

Since the war, we're the only intelligent species left in the universe, therefore we think everything in this universe has to conform to our paradigm of what makes sense. Do you have any idea how arrogant that view is and on how little of this universe we base it? — Robert Buettner

It would not stay, and it would not keep away, so that the unhappy shore could never possess, could never forget. Or maybe it was the shore's pale indifference that drove the sea wild, so that every so often she whipped herself into a hurricane or a nor'easter, wreaking her vengeance indiscriminately. Just so, an artist, ignored too long by a callous world, may break into brilliance, or flame up into cynical stuntsmanship, or drop herself like a stone down the dark well of despair. — Rachel Pastan

Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut. — Linda Pastan

I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. [from "After an Absence"] — Linda Pastan

Just looking at them I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves waiting on their shelves to be broken open
that one and that
and I make my choice in a mood of exalted luck, browsing among them like a cow in sweetest pasture. For life is continuous as long as they wait to be read
these inked paths opening into the future, page after page, every book its own receding horizon. And I hold them, one in each hand, a curious ballast weighing me here to earth. — Linda Pastan

Add children to the list of things I hate. — Lauren Morrill

The things we make have one supreme quality - they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many. — Neil MacGregor

Spring is the shortest season. — Linda Pastan

I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list. — Linda Pastan

What we want is never simple. — Linda Pastan

I am tired of the litany
of months, September October
I am tired of the way the seasons
keep changing, mimicking
the seasons of the flesh
which are real and finite. — Linda Pastan

Grief is a circular staircase. — Linda Pastan

The sea lives in every one of us. — Robert Wyland

Because the night you asked me,
the small scar of the quarter moon
had healed - the moon was whole again;
because life seemed so short;
because life stretched out before me
like the halls of a nightmare;
because I knew exactly what I wanted;
because I knew exactly nothing;
because I shed my childhood with my clothes -
they both had years of wear in them;
because your eyes were darker than my father's;
because my father said I could do better;
because I wanted badly to say no;
because Stanly Kowalski shouted "Stella...;"
because you were a door I could slam shut;
because endings are written before beginnings;
because I knew that after twenty years
you'd bring the plants inside for winter
and make a jungle we'd sleep in naked;
because I had free will;
because everything is ordained;
I said yes. — Linda Pastan

I regret the way pain has taught me nothing. — Linda Pastan

Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials. — Harold E. Varmus

I like girls who don't mind that I hang out with my friends. — Michael Rosenbaum

You are sick not weak. It is okay to be depressed. — Kevin Breel

Like a child at bedtime who insists she's not tired, Celia's provocation was all unproductive, almost self-negating. Sometimes I thought this was just her scorpion nature, but other times it seemed to me that she had settled on this pose purposefully, out of some dimly perceived, horribly misplaced idea that the job of an artist was to hide her light under the darkest bushel possible and wait for a dedicated acolyte to be drawn to it like a clairvoyant moth. — Rachel Pastan

I'm only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I'll be gone forever - -
the way the door closes
behind me with such solidity,
the way my suitcase
carries everything
I'd need for an eternity
of traveling light.
I've left my hotel number
on your desk, instructions
about the dog and heating dinner. But
like the weather front
they warn is on its way
with its switchblades
of wind and ice,
our lives have minds
of their own. — Linda Pastan

What is at the heart of all national problems? It is that we have seen the hand of material interest sometimes about to close upon our dearest rights and possessions. — Woodrow Wilson

To be the other woman
is to be a season
that is always about to end,
when the air is flowered
with jasmine and peach,
and the weather day after day
is flawless,
and the forecast
is hurricane. — Linda Pastan

There is nothing more fragile than civilization. — Havelock Ellis

Evil is simply
a grammatical error:
a failure to leap
the precipice
between "he"
and "I. — Linda Pastan

Wasn't the leap from the farm or the small town to the college campus enough cultural dislocation? Wasn't college education itself enough of a voyage? — Rachel Pastan

Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people — C.S. Lewis

The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world. — Charles Colson

Must every action - every word and thought - recall Alena? Swimming, currents, beaches, exhibitions, artists, parties. How long until my bodily presence had half the substance her absence did? — Rachel Pastan

In preparation for a career in academic medicine, I worked as a medical house officer at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital from 1966 to 1968 and then joined Ira Pastan's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health as a Clinical Associate. — Harold E. Varmus

A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again — W.B.Yeats

[But the constricted light,
the year closing down on itself with all
the vacancies of January ahead, leave me
unreconciled even to beauty.]
When will you be coming back? — Linda Pastan

The tragedy of September 11th was so sudden, so enormous, and so horrendous, both in terms of lives lost and global consequences, that this country and the world went into immediate and prolonged shock. — Allen Klein

What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there. — Linda Pastan

Without artists, would this heritage have descended to us? Would the words and deeds - the revelation - have survived the arduous journey into the present without the painters, the mosaic workers, the storytellers, the stone carvers, the poets, the singers, the workers in stained glass? Wasn't it art, I thought - as I watched Bernard open a handsome black wallet and remove a handful of lire - that had been the carrier of the divine? Popes had understood that. The Emperor Constantine. Monks in damp Irish monasteries illuminating the Word. — Rachel Pastan

Japan would never invade the United States. We would find a rifle behind every blade of grass. — Isoroku Yamamoto

and with great solemnity, 'I'm glad yer stopped 'em fighting. I'm scared — Barbara Taylor Bradford