Quotes About Strength

When she bleeds the smells I know change colour. There is iron in her soul on those days. She smells like a gun.

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

There's no such thing as effortless beauty--you should know that. There's no effort which is not beautiful--lifting a heavy stone or loving you. Loving you is like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I'm not quite sure why I am doing it. It takes all my strength and all my determination, and I said I wouldn't love someone again like this. Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off.

The world is surely wide enough to walk without fear.

In this life, you have to be your own hero.

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love's hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.

I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips.

Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.

We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it.

My dear, you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.

I was in those days all about the 'fuck you'. Fuck you for not recognising how great I am. I'll do it myself.

The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."' That's from the Song of Solomon. We sing what we know.

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed.

He had the dog on a lead and he was still managing to be a boy with a dog and the dog was still managing to be a dog with a boy because not even a bomb gets to wipe out everything

In this life you have to be your own hero. By that I mean you have to win whatever it is that matters to you by your own strength and in your own way.