Rio 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But the first time I saw you. Rio. I took that down to the gardens. I pressed it into the leaves of a silver maple and recited it to the Waterloo Vase. It didn’t fit in any rooms.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

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

Make art, make mistakes, and have no regrets.

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.

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

Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.

I have to go to her, Lucan. For my own sanity, if nothing else. If I stay here, I'm not sure what good I'd be, to tell you the truth. She's the only thing that's held me together in a very long time. I'm a wreck for this woman, my friend. She owns me now.

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

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.

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.

Si todos los rios son dulces de donde saca sal el mar? If all rivers are sweet where does the sea get its salt?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Existe um certo milagre nos encontros. Não é tolo dizer que o amor é sagrado.

Nothing unites men like a common enemy.

Through the thorns, to the stars

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

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.

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

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.

Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.

Mas e o amor? O que é senão um monte de gostar? Gostar de falar, gostar de tocar, gostar de cheirar, gostar de ouvir, gostar de olhar. Gostar de se abandonar no outro. O amor não passa de um gostar de muitos verbos ao mesmo tempo.

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.

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.)

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

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!

A morte põe um olho no passado e outro no futuro e deixa a gente cego na hora, no encontro do que foi e do que será, na tortura do que poderia ter sido. Impõe o desespero do definitivo, trava os movimentos. Embrulha o estômago indigesta. Faz frio nos ossos. A morte é vida intensa demais para quem fica.

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 am wretched. Destitute.

Everyone in the room was watching James—how could they not?—but I was the only one who really knew him, every inch.

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.

When you stop chasing your dreams, your dreams start chasing you.

What did she want to tell me that was so tremendous it had drawn tears from her, a woman made of marble?

Like she’s a shark and you’re an oblivious fur seal.” Me: “Why is that the word everyone’s using to describe me lately?” James: “Who else called you a fur seal?” Me: “Not that. Never mind.

I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily. Para-Wa-Samen (Ten Bears) of the Tamparika Comanches

Whatever we did—or, more crucially, did not do—it seemed that so long as we did it together, our individual sins might be abated. There is no comfort like complicity.

O que mais existe no mundo são pessoas que nunca vão se conhecer. Nasceram em um lugar distante, e o acaso não fará com que se cruzem. Um desperdício. Muitos desses encontros destinados a não acontecer poderiam ter sido arrebatadores.

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.

I have nothing of my own now, not even secrets.

if you haven’t made any enemies in life, you’ve been living too safely. And that is what I wish to discourage

Two or three times a year, set aside four days, away from work, family, and technology, to check in with yourself, gain perspective, daydream, and evaluate your life.

Um dia feliz tem mais poder que a tristeza de uma vida inteira. Nele moram as reviravoltas

O tempo, o tempo, o tempo e suas águas inflamáveis, esse rio largo que não cansa de correr, lento e sinuoso, ele próprio reconhecendo seus caminhos, recolhendo e filtrando de vária direção o caldo turvo dos afluentes e o sangue ruivo de outros canais para com eles construir a razão mística da história...

Why is it women have to bring all this angst into sex? We should be more like men. In. Out. Over. Next.

We cracked up", I say, but the phrase feels wrong. It was not so simple, or as clean, as a piece of fractured glass. "But we didn't really shatter until we were all back together again.

I cheated on my fears,broke up with my doubts,got engaged to my faith,and now I'm marrying my Dreams.Soon I will be holding hands with Destiny!

e não existe um só pilar de granito a impedir-me de partir.

A gente não vai para o céu. É o oposto: o céu é que nos entra, pulmões adentro. A pessoa morre e é engasgada em nuvem.

When we’re constantly stuck in our screens, we’re missing out on what’s happening around us and within us.

A maior maldade de todos os tempos, a mais cruel, foi inventar que o sofrimento está para o bem assim como o prazer está para o mal.

You know everyone calls you 'nice'...but that's not the word. You're good. So good you have no idea how good you are.

Quem nunca sofreu por amor nunca aprenderá a amar. Amar é o terror de perder o outro, é o medo do silêncio e do quarto deserto, de tudo o que se pensa sem puder falar, do que se murmura a sós sem ter a quem dizer em voz alta. É preciso sentir esse terror para saber o que é amar. E, quando enfim tudo desaba, quando o outro partiu e deixou atrás de si o silêncio e o quarto deserto por entre os escombros e a humilhação de uma felicidade desfeita, resta o orgulho de saber que se amou.

Então Jesus compreendeu que viera trazido ao engano como se leva o cordeiro ao sacrifício, que a sua vida fora traçada para morrer assim desde o princípio dos princípios, e, subindo-lhe à lembrança o rio de sangue e de sofrimento que do seu lado irá nascer e alagar toda a terra, clamou para o céu aberto onde Deus sorria, Homens, perdoai-lhe, porque ele não sabe o que fez.

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? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.

She says, "Were you love in him?" "Yes" I say, simply. After all that, was it so strange? I am no longer baffled, or amazed, or embarrassed by it. "Yes I was" It wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth is, I am in love with him still.

Maybe every day we let grief in, we’ll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we’ll be able to breathe again. At least, that’s how Shakespeare would tell the story. Hamlet says, ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’. But just awhile. The show’s not over. ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight’. The rest of us must go on.

My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,” he said. “Because it is an enemy to thee.” The balcony scene. Too mistrustful to guess at the meaning, I said, “Don’t do that, James, please—right now can we just be ourselves?” He crouched down, lifted the mangled script from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s easier now to be Romeo, or Macbeth, or Brutus, or Edmund. Someone else.

This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

But if I had to choose between where I live and you, I'd rip up everything I own because the only landscape worth looking is the landscape of the human body. I kiss your Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I kiss your Missouri and Monongahela and Susquehanna and Shenandoah and Rio Grande. I kiss the confluence of all those rivers. I kiss your amber waves of grain. I kiss your spacious skies, your rocket's red glare, your hand I love, your purple mountain'd majesty. But most of all I kiss your head. I kiss the place where we make our decisions. I kiss the place where we keep our resolves. The place where we do our dreams. I kiss the place behind the eyes where we store up secrets and knowledge to save us if we're caught in a corridor on a dark, wintry evening.

He stared up at me for a moment, then lifted his head and pulled me down to meet him. It was almost a brotherly kiss, but not quite. Too fragile, too painful. Soft whispers of surprise and confusion swept through the audience. My heart throbbed, and it hurt so badly that I bit his lip. I felt his breath catch and let him go, lowered him to the floor again. Silence lingered overlong.

Eu e Antônio estamos casados há vinte e seis anos. Nem sempre é bom, nem sempre é ruim. Desconheço a balança que mede isso. É o que é, aceito, rejeito, mas não escolho mais tirar de mim esse amor entranhado, pertence a lugares em mim que não mando mais. Não fico tomando conta, podia ser assim, podia ser assado, medindo com régua o que falta. Não quero viver sem Antônio, me caso todos os dias com ele, acordo e caso, depois faço o café. Tem dia que ele tá chato de doer, largo pra lá, vai ser chato longe de mim e pronto. Ele melhora sozinho, depois piora e torna a melhorar, e a gente vai assim tomando distância e diminuindo distância. Caminhando.