Literary, Poetry & Storytelling

My favorite quotes are from poets, veterans, healers and activists. Some have been nurses or soldiers in war, battled cancer, sexism, racism or homophobia. Others have agitated for peace and justice or simply shared their personal stories or pain and triumph.

I cannot yet part with my books, not only the words in them, but the bound copies I carried to bed, in the tub or on plane rides. Sometimes I clutched them like a baby with a blankie. Other times they were fortifying bits of soul nutrition.

As I flipped through my own books I came to pages coming loose from the binding threatening to spill to the floor when I open them. Letters to a Young Poet is like that. It is weathered but the words are a fresh balm every time. Timelessly fresh.

Here is the first installment in my favorites collection. Literary. Spiritual. Memoir. I hope at least one brings you comfort or insight.

Excerpt from Letter to a Young Poet

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Excerpt from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

Who will speak these days, / if not I, / if not you?

Muriel Rukeyser

Excerpt from The Gift of Story, A Wise Tale About What is Enough

…the ultimate gift of story is twofold; that at least one soul remains who can tell the story, and that by the recounting of the tale, the greater forces of love, mercy, generosity and strength are continuously called into being in the world.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

Excerpt from The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die

A Prayer

Refuse to fall down
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting your heart
toward heaven
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

Excerpt from Our Dead Behind Us

Some women wait for themselves
around the next corner
and call the empty spot peace.
But the opposite of living
is only not living
and the stars do not care.
Some women wait for something
to change and nothing
does change
so they change
themselves.

Audre Lorde

Excerpt from A New Path to the Waterfall

Late Fragment

And did you get what
You wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on this earth.

Raymond Carver

This always reminds me of my friend Lynn who has always loved Raymond Carver.