Quotes About Reflection

Nothing recedes into the vanishing point of time's rear-view faster than the truth.

Looking back, I think I was always musical. My dad was very musical, and I think my mom was musical.

It's like if you're an astronaut and you've been to the moon, what do you want to do with the rest of your life?

Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.

Education is a place where we ask, 'Did you get the answers right?' as opposed to, 'What did you learn?

Prayer does not offer a less busy life, but a less busy heart."-Paul Miller Quote Read 1/29/18

If it's true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must've kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way—that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man's eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there's so much lost time to make up for.

walking with on Robertson was an outing of the self-destructed, trying to make do with one day at a time.

Some of the agonies that burn in the heart forever begin as brief as snapshots.

Poetry served as a sort of intellectual wallpaper to brighten up the closet.

exactly half the phenomenal world is gone

How do you think poetry helps people? he'd ask, wanting the whole thing quantified so he could compare it to digging wells in the Peace Corps.

I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.

Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slanted yellow light.

Summer has always been good to me, even the bittersweet end, with the slant of yellow light.

What love gives you is the courage to face the secrets you've kept from yourself, a reason to open the rest of the doors.

a body on the sand. My journal gets very spotty here, with only a single detailed entry

If later on, as we read this, we might think "How happy we were then!" at least we'll have that. That as we lived them, these moments, we knew they were important, and that's all there is.

I don't fatten frogs to feed snakes. Are you stupid? I taught you better than that. A wet pussy and a dry purse don't match.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

It takes a special, ironic kind of person to use their own impending death as an impetus to finally live.

You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

You only grow when you are alone.