Tag: quotes

Literary Epitaphs (Part 1)

Anne Sexton:

“Rats live on no evil star.”

John Keats:

“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

Ernest Hemingway:

“Best of all he loved the fall / the leaves yellow on
the cottonwoods / leaves floating on the trout streams / and above the
hills the high blue windless skies…now he will be a part of them
forever.”

Emily Dickinson:

“Called Back.”

Sylvia Plath:

“Even amidst fierce flames / The golden lotus can be planted.”

Allen Ginsberg:

“My heart is still, as time will tell.”

Elizabeth Bishop:

“All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

Hilda Doolittle:

“So you may say, / Greek flower; Greek ecstasy / Reclaims Forever / One who died / Following / Intricate Song’s lost Measure.”

Robert Lowell:

“The immortal is scraped / Unconsenting from the mortal.”

Virginia Woolf:

“Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding o Death! The waves broke on the shore.”

Robert Frost:

“I had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World.”

Edgar Allan Poe:

“Here, at last, he is happy.”

Rainer Maria Rilke:

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight / of being no one’s sleep under so / many lids.”

Henry Miller:

“I am going to beat those bastards,”

Dylan Thomas:

“Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea…”

“Jessica
has a forehead scar from
the deep end of a pool. I
ask Jessica what drowning
feels like and she says
not everything feels like
something else.”

— Angie Sijun Lou, “Jessica gives me a chill pill,” published in Muzzle

“Often children who survive extremely adverse childhoods
have learned a particular survival strategy. I call it ‘strategic
detachment.’ This is not the withdrawal from reality that leads to
psychological disturbance, but an intuitively calibrated disengagement
from noxious aspects of their family life or other aspects of their
world. They some how know, This is not all there is. They hold the
belief that a better alternative exists somewhere and that someday they
will find their way to it. They persevere in that idea. They somehow
know Mother is not all women, Father is not all men, this family does
not exhaust the possibilities of human relationships-there is life
beyond this neighborhood. This does not spare them suffering in the
present, but it allows them not to be destroyed by it. Their strategic
detachment does not guarantee that they will never know feelings of
powerlessness, but it helps them not to be stuck there.”

— Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self Esteem

“Childhood trauma can affect a person so greatly because
of its prescence in the time of developmemt. Events that would normally
change a person become embedded in every fiber of one’s identity. It is
this time of life which is so crucial to your entire future. This is the
unique nature of C-PTSD, which doesn’t merely change a person, it
creates them. It builds every trait, interest, and understanding of the
world with this toxin. Nothing is unaffected or unaltered because all
there is to alter was created by the trauma. Moving forward is not
moving back to before the trauma, it is in every essence a rebirth and
reeducation of life itself. To move on we can not erase, because to
erase trauma’s effect we in theory erase ourselves.”

— Understanding Childhood C-PTSD

“It is always appropriate to ask for
love, but to ask any other adult (including our parents in the present)
to meet our primal needs is unfair and unrealistic. Most of us emerge
from childhood with conscious and unconscious primal wounds and
emotional unfinished business. What we leave incomplete we are doomed to
repeat. The untreated traumas of childhood become the frustrating
dramas of adulthood. Our fantasy of the “perfect partner,” or our
disappointments in a relationship we do not change or leave, or the
dramas that keep arising in our relationships reveal our unique unmet
primal wounds and needs. We try so hard to get from others what once we
missed. What was missed can never be made up for, only mourned and let
go of. Only then are we able to relate to adults as adults.”

— David Richo, How to Be an Adult

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this
world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to
give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing;
it is almost a miracle, it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they
have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness,
pity are not enough. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply
means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a
recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a
collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled
‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped
with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it
is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way
of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its
own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking
at, just as he is, in all his truth.”


— Simone Weil, “Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies” from the Simone Weil Reader, p. 51