Sappho: "Without warning, as a..."

"Without warning,
As a whirlpool swoons upon an oak,
Love shakes my heart."

—Sappho

Rainer Maria Rilke: "The point of marriage..."

"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.  A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent... But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Unknown: "No one can truly..."

"No one can truly think of God.  It is therefore my wish to leave everything that I can think and choose for my love the thing that I cannot think.  God can be loved but not thought.  He can be taken and held by love, but not by thought."

—Unknown, The Cloud of Unknowing

Unknown: "Take just a little..."

"Take just a little word of one syllable rather than two... Such a one is the word God or the word love.  Choose which you prefer... and fasten this word to your heart so that whatever happens it will never go away.  This word is to be your shield and your spear, whether you are riding in peace or in war.  With this word you are to beat upon the cloud and the darkness above and beneath you.  With this word you are to strike down every kind of thought, driving it down into a pool of forgetting.  If any thought should press upon you, asking what you would have, answer with no word but this one.  If your thoughts should offer, out of their great learning to analyze your word for you and tell you its meanings, say to your thoughts that you want to keep it whole... It is not a matter of analyzing or elucidating... "

—Unknown, The Cloud of Unknowing

Rumi: "Out beyond ideas of..."

"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.  I will meet you there."

—Rumi

Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make..."

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

—Eleanor Roosevelt

Laura Munson, "You might think all..."

"You might think all this would find me in a place of intense pain. panic, even. State of emergency. But I am choosing something else.  I am choosing not to suffer."


—Laura Munson, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is

Katherine Rosman: "She was our mom..."

"She was our mom. We were her girls. Inevitabilities like adulthood and marriage didn't change that."

—Katherine Rosman, If You Knew Suzy