Quotes from Heather Rose

Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity, you must be fearless.

Art creates a certain familiarity with loneliness. And possibly with pain. Physical, mental, it doesn't really matter. It's all a catalyst. I don't like to admit that because it's depressing, but in truth pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on time after time.

Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one. Stella Adler

I'd open the door in the morning and the slightly sweet smell of second hand books would greet me. For years I wondered just what that smell was. In the end I decided it was the smell of human thought embedded in paper.

The woman in red was surrounded by the crowd and she was alone. It was utterly public but intensely private.

There ought to be a name for the kind of overwhelm that happens when you realise there are too many things to fight. If it's not environment, then it's human rights. If it's not human rights, it's women's rights. Law and order. Gun control. Invasive species. Water pollution. Tax reform. Refugee policy. Education. Health care. The list is endless.

Even after all this time, the sun never says, 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole world.

What sort of brainwashing, he had wondered, had created a world in which people worked fifty or sixty hours a week, every week, no matter how beautiful the day outside, no matter what thoughts they were having? Where would the paintings come from? The novels and sculptures? The music?

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. E.E. Cummings

I wanted to be free of today. As if in the telling, there would be a cure.

Was he really meant to give up his own life to care for her every hour of the day? Had he really signed up for that?

Parenting is a long lesson in letting go.

What she didn't know, what she took for granted about living with Karl and being a wife, was far larger than the things she could name.

Nothing is solved. We go on and the scar tissue gets a little more pliable. It will never not be sad. It will never not hurt. It will go on being at the heart of my mother, my father, my brother, my sister and me. We are five of the millions and millions of people who walk this world carrying our grief in a knotted scarf and hoping it will not come undone.

Every hour of the day an artist falls to earth and we fall beside them. I fell a long time ago with Arky Levin. But I fell before that beside Marina Abramovi?.

Grief is a pilgrimage, a long song, a poem that is never quite finished.

Distant shareholders have no understanding of the damage caused by their investments.

it feels as if this big tree must have a direct connection to whoever is in charge.

Physicists now know that 70 per cent of the known universe is dark energy. Dark matter is another 25 per cent. Once we thought we knew all about life, but it turns out everything we think of as reality is less than 5 per cent.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. MARY SHELLEY

There is choice. We can suffer or make miracles.

Along with a career, four children and a husband, she bakes and cooks, sews, preserves, sings, embroiders, gardens, arranges flowers, decorates cakes, and makes kayaks and pottery.

Perhaps spirituality is another word for curiosity.

There is an intelligence at work in my body. I am in awe. I had, until then, been pretty certain my brain ran everything. Not so, said the wise labouring body. Not so.