Ml Quotes

For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.

You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.

Scars are just another kind of memory.

What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends? … That,’ Frederick said, 'is where the tragedy is.

Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.

One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

Were you in love with him?' 'Yes,' I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. 'Yes, I was.' It's not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I'm in love with him still.

It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.

Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.

There is no comfort like complicity.

Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.

I never asked where he went, worried he wouldn’t ask me to follow.

You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.

The things about Shakespeare is, he's so eloquent...he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.

Secrets carry weight, like lead.

For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.

I don't know, it's like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets makes sense. The good ones, anyway.

James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.

Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.

The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.

Sometimes life turns out hard, Isabel. Sometimes it just bites right through you. And sometimes, just when you think it's done its worst, it comes back and takes another chunk.

When did we become such terrible people?” “Maybe we’ve always been terrible.

Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?” The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it.

Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.

One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.

History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.

The real sky was enormous overhead, making our mirrors and twinkling stage lights seem ridiculous- Man’s futile attempt to imitate God

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?

There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory....Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.

We’re only ever playing fifty percent of a character. The rest is us, and we’re afraid to show people who we really are. We’re afraid of looking foolish if we reveal the full force of our emotions.

We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.

But in Shakespeare's world, passion is irresistible, not embarrassing.

Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.

You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.

I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in.

No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth...

Make art, make mistakes, and have no regrets.

Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past.

Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.

It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.

I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story. Far too many times I had asked myself whether art was imitating life or if it was the other way around.

Then he remembered Ralph's words--"no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.

So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?

Anything can feel like punishment if it’s taught poorly.

We had, like seven siblings, spent so much time together that we had seen the best and worst of one another and were unimpressed by either.

But I stayed where I was, afraid to move toward him, afraid I might lose my footing on solid ground, detach from what had anchored me before and drift out into the void of space - a vagabond, wandering moon.

You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.

I am all too aware of my own desperate need to find a message in the madness, and as it takes shape I am suspicious, afraid to hope. But the implications of the text and its small part in our story are impossible to ignore, too critical for a scholar as meticulous as James to overlook.

That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.

When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear.

When it was his turn to speak I watched him closely, uncertain whether he was acting only, or if he and I were both gnashing secrets between our teeth.

He'd never been in my house and I was self-conscious, embarrassed by it. I was painfully aware of the fact that we didn't have enough books.

From Hamlet. That’s what he reminded me of.” “Oh,” he said. “Not sure I can see him as a sparrow. Too . . . delicate.” “So what sort of bird would he be?” “Dunno. The sort that smacked into a window trying to have a go at its own reflection.

I knew by then the way the story went. Our little drama was rapidly hurtling towards its climactic crisis. What next, when we reached the precipice? First, the reckoning. Then, the fall.

Listen, son… when I was your age, I had to face truths that seemed to break the world. That’s what happens when you come into contact with people who aren’t quite like you. You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.

Something changed irrevocably, in those few dark minutes James was submerged, as if the lack of oxygen had caused all our molecules to rearrange.

I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

He was too spotless to talk of blood and murder like Macbeth, but in the red glare of the fire he no longer looked so angelic. Instead he was handsome the way you think of the devil as handsome—forbiddingly so.

The water, too, was still, and I thought, what liars they are, the sky and the water. Still and calm and clear, like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, and really, it never would be again.

Your family's never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.

You know, you scare the hell out of me [...] I don't know, it's like, I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense.

Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: fierceness on a scale only gods can summon.

If a lighthouse looks like it's in a different place, it's not the lighthouse that's moved.

Remember-doubts may check pride, but too much doubt will keep you from doing what must be done.

Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing each other out. We set this house on fire, forgetting that we live within. (from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)

Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.

Nothing unites men like a common enemy.

Sometimes, you're the one who strikes it lucky. Sometimes, it's the other poor bastard who's left with the short straw, and you just have to shut up and get on with it.

The oceans never stop ... the wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island ... Existence here is on the scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia ...

Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don't look so different anymore to some.

There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces.

Through the thorns, to the stars

Was I not always his right-hand man, his lieutenant? Banquo or Benvolio or Oliver - little difference.

I’ve hope to live, and am prepared to die.

Nothing makes sense to him either. His whole world is falling apart, and once he realizes he can’t stop it or fix it or change it, there’s only one thing left to do.” My eyes adjusted slowly, maddeningly. “What’s that?” His shadow shrugged in the gloom. “Absolve yourself. Blame it on fate.

But if I learned one thing from Firebird, it’s that a person’s tragedy doesn’t define them or cancel all the good in their life.

I’ve never needed a sword to protect you—to raise you the way your father wanted. Caring for my family meant putting away the fighter, so I did.

Very slowly, he turned a full circle, taking in the nothingness of it all. It seemed his lungs could never be large enough to breathe in this much air, his eyes could never see this much space, nor could he near the full extent of the rolling, roaring ocean. For the briefest moment, he had no edges.

When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses. Ritual madness, ecstasy, human sacrifice.

What are you?” Takeru whispered. Something bigger than myself , she realized. “I’m Matsuda Misaki,” she said with pride and honesty she never attached to those words before. “I’m your wife.” And she attacked him.

We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum. (I blame this in part for what happened.)

This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!

Humans withdraw to their homes, and surrender the night to the creatures that own it: the crickets, the owls, the snakes. A world that hasn't changed for hundreds of thousands of years wakes up, and carries on as if the daylight and the humans and the changes to the landscape have all been an illusion.

When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.

Oliver, I don’t understand,” he said. “Why?” “You know why.” I was done pretending otherwise.

I can forgive and forget... it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things

His voice sounded flat, wrong, as if someone had struck a false note on the piano.

My martyrdom is not the selfless kind. I can't look at Filippa, shamed by all the injuries I've inflicted- like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest, ready to blow himself up without a thought for the collateral damage.

Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go. Leave the rest to the angels, or the devil or whoever's in charge of it.

They [the stars] just kept shining, no matter what was going on. I think of the light here like that, like a splinter of a star that's fallen to earth: it just shines, no matter what is happening.

I was seized by the strange unfounded idea that she was debating whether or not to say I love you. But the difference between us was that she assumed people just knew these sorts of things, while I always worried that they didn’t.

As soon as we notice that certain types of event "like" to cluster together at certain times, we begin to understand the attitude of the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a "science" of meaningful coincidences. The classical Chinese texts did not ask what causes what, but rather what "likes" to occur with what.

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

And the stars: the sky gets crowded at night, and it is a bit like watching a clock, seeing the constellations slide across the sky. It’s comforting to know that they’ll show up, however bad the day has been, however crook things get. That used to help in France. It put things into perspective—the stars had been around since before there were people. They just kept shining, no matter what was going on. I think of the light here like that, like a splinter of a star that’s fallen to earth: it just shines, no matter what is happening. Summer, winter, storm, fine weather. People can rely on it.