Success Tastes Sweetest Quotes

Come when you should. All this will have been passing through me for you to breathe. I have gazed at it for so long, for your sake, namelessly, with the gaze of poverty, and have loved it, as if already you drank it in. And yet: when I recall that all this- myself, stars, flowers, the sharp flight of a bird out of gesturing brushwood, the clouds' haughtiness and what the wind could do to me at night, whisking me out of one being into next,-that all this, in endless succession (for I am all this, am what the potion's roar left behind in my ear, am the exquisite taste which once a ripe fruit expended on my lips),- that all this, when once you're really here, all, even back to the boy's low gaze into the chalices of high-grown flower fields, even back to one of my mother's smiles which I perhaps, thronged with your being, shall think of as something stolen-, that all this I then shall have to inexhaustibly outgive, night and day, so much unsparingly assimilated nature-, never knowing if what begins to glow in you is mine: perhaps you'll grow more beautiful entirely from your own beauty, from the profusion of restedness in your limbs, from what is sweetest in your blood,-for all I know, because there is awareness even in your hand, because your hair flatters your shoulders, because something in the dark breeze is one with you, because your forget me totally, because you don't strain to hear, because you are a woman: when I recall how I've thrust tenderness into that blood I'd never startled, the voiceless heartstream of things held dear Toledo, November 1912

SWEETEST IN THE GALE by Michelle Valois After Emily Dickinson You won’t lose your hair, I heard at the start of treatment, and though I didn’t, I lost a litany of other lesser and greater luxuries—saliva, stamina, taste buds, my voice—but my hair, during that chilly sojourn in the land of extremity to which I had sailed on a strange and stormy sea, my hair was not taken from me. Had it been, I would have perched one of those 18th century wigs on my head, such as those worn by the French aristocracy, measuring three, four, even five feet high and stuffed, as they were known to be, with all sorts of things: ribbons, pearls, jewels, flowers, tunes without words, reproductions of great sailing vessels, my soul inside a little bird cage—ornaments selected to satisfy a theme: the signs of the Zodiac (à la Zodiaque) or the discovery of a new vaccine (à l’inoculation) or, as was the case in June of 1782, the first successful hot air balloon flight by the brothers Michel and Etienne Montgolfier. Regarde, I exclaim to my ladies in waiting, pointing to the sky on that bright afternoon as the balloon, made of linen and paper, rises some 6,000 feet. Later, a duck, then a sheep, and finally a human is carried away. I watch, inspired, hopeful, whispering, lest my doctors overhear: when the storm turns sore, and that little bird escapes her little bird cage and is abashed without reckoning, I will sail away in my balloon, prepared, if it fails me, to pluck a few ostrich feathers from the high hair of the Queen of France herself; they and hope (which never asked for a crumb) will carry me beyond disease for as long as I have left to choose between futility and flight.

Success is the sweetest thing to taste, the bitterest thing to lose, and the hardest thing to earn.