20th-century Author Quotes

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

Jim Shepard
Jim Shepard
If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.

Ireland regards sex, when she regards it at all, with an entirely primitive and practical eye.

To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things.

There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.

Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know.

Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.... And we shall know him then for what he was and is—a prince, our own black shining Prince!—who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so.

Ossie Davis
Ossie Davis
The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.

David Whyte (poet)
David Whyte (poet)
Shatter the icons of slavery and fear.
Replace
the leer
of the minstrel's burnt-cork face
with a proud, serene
and classic bronze of Benin.

One of the most important results you can bring into the world is the you that you really want to be.

Robert Fritz
Robert Fritz
Fear - jealousy - money - revenge - and protecting someone you love.

Perpetrators who receive the gift of forgiveness are given a chance to change

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus.... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be

The hoop dancer dances within what encircles him, demonstrating how the people live in motion within the circling spirals of time and space. They are no more limited than water and sky. At green corn dance time, water and sky come together, in Indian time, to make rain.

Paula Gunn Allen
Paula Gunn Allen
Despite disappointments, the Christian is obligated to pray for the sick because we are bidden to do so and because the crumb of our caring is but a morsel broken from the whole loaf of the Father's infinite and tender love.

None of us can afford to pay the price of resenting...because of what it does to us.

Marion D. Hanks
Marion D. Hanks
While you're alive, the IRS will attempt to take what you've made. When you're not, the IRS will attempt to take what it missed.

Even when we speak of selflessness, the mind goes to "me." We think, "I'm selfless," but everything is selfless.

Sakyong Mipham
Sakyong Mipham
Children can withstand a lot of pressure and trial from the outside if the home inside is held steady by parents whose character is steady.

First we must see that we cannot will ourselves to be open because openness is our very nature. Any tiny residue of willing, of wanting to be open takes us away from what we are. Willing never goes beyond willing. So the only way to be free from this circle is to glimpse the truth that openness is the egoless state, that it is here and now

There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave into a cloth that feels like love itself.

To keep the fire burning brightly there's one easy rule: Keep the two logs together, near enough to keep each other warm and far enough apart - about a finger's breadth - for breathing room. Good fire, good marriage, same rule.

I'd rather live precariously in my own office than comfortably in somebody else's.

Every thread you discover in the local web of life leads beyond your place to life elsewhere.

What a recovery of the wisdom of the Mother brings to all of us is the knowledge of inseparable connection with the entire creation and the wise, active love that is born from that knowledge.