You know it's cold outside when the cats don't want to sit on the windowsill...

[lagilman]

Many, many, many years ago I wrote a piece of fanfic (yeah, I know, shaddup) whose basic premise and conceit were triggered by a quote that resonated through me, bone, sinew and spirit.


"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
-Albert Einstein


I ran into that quote again while doing research today, and it sill gives me the same sense of 'right place, right time, right person listening' chills.


Does anyone else have a quote or saying that did/does that for them? Share!

Comments

Quotes which inspired me

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Mine (from memory, might be slightly off the original text):

"We cross our bridges when we come to them, and burn them behind us, with nothing left to show for our progress except the memory of the smell of smoke and the presumption that our eyes once watered."

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

I'm also quite fond of a snippet from somewhere in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun cycle: "In the end, our one unforgiveable sin is that we can only be who we are."

[jack-yoniga.livejournal.com]

Hell is the place of those who have denied;
They find there what they planted and what dug,
A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,
And wander there and drift, and never cease
Wailing for substance.

—W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916). "The Hour-Glass"

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Two poems:

Henley's Invictus - "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul" was a clarion call to a picked-on teenager. (insert any story of a fan before they discovered fan culture.)

And all of Flecker's "To a Poet 1000 Years Hence." I really felt like he was talking to me.

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet, archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along

I care not if you bridge the seas
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue:
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

-- James Elroy Flecker

[lagilman]

I always loved that poem, too. it was sappy, but for a reason -- the person writing it was writing it was, and was writing to, someone who was unafraid to be sappy as well.

[kradical.livejournal.com]

This will sound facetious, but this quote has always been my touchstone:

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying." ---Woody Allen

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

I ran into this while feeding my hyperplexia habit during lunch:

The inability to write reflects the sufferer's feeling that he or she cannot contribute to the world, cannot communicate with others in any meaningful way.- Dr. Alice W. Flaherty, THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE

I'm still staring at this comment she made in her introductin about the neurological dynamic of writer's block, I can only say... damn .
-=Jeff=-

[equesgal.livejournal.com]

"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." -- Will Rogers

[girasole.livejournal.com]

"It is important to know what one longs for, and to know it clearly. In the area of desire, one should not err."

Mary Gordon, in one of her novels. This is from memory, but I had it on my desk for a long time.

What is still on my desk is a quote from a speech by Joyce Carol Oates:

"The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence."

Both of these are deeply precious to me, and I hold them close. They continue to inspire.

[signeh.livejournal.com]

Here's what I hold onto in the dark places of my writer's soul:

"You will see I am a writer who came from a sheltered life; but a sheltered life can be a daring life as well, for all serious daring starts from within." Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings.

[deire.livejournal.com]

I'm quoting from memory, so this might not be exact. It was internal monologue from a director whose first play was opening, about dreams and trying to express them. He had just found a new ending to his nightmares about falling.

"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes you fall. And sometimes...sometimes you fly." --Neil Gaiman, _Sandman_

[kefiraahava.livejournal.com]

At the moment, from my rotating stock of such:

"You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labor and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?"
--Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women"

[koinonia.livejournal.com]

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Aung San Suu Kyi

Uber-Geek... Quotes... Imagination.

[neuroman42.livejournal.com]

I have always loved this one, from the Uber-Geek himself...

"Imagination is more important than knowledge"- Albert Einstein