Quotes for Prompts

Here's a few writing prompts in the form of quotes and poetic lines:

"The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing." - Eric Berne, psychiatrist

"I dreamed a knife like a song you can't whistle." - Frank Stanford, "The Singing Knives"

"Which failure cannot cast down nor success make proud."  - Robinson Jeffers, "Rock and Hawk"

"...at night he remembers freedom And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it." - Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks"

"I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk." - Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks"

"We are safe to finish what we have to finish." - Robinson Jeffers, "The Bed By The Window"

"Be angry at the sun for setting." - Robinson Jeffers, "Be Angry at the Sun for Setting"

"Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's  values." - Robinson Jeffers, "The Bloody Sire"

"Old violence is not too old to beget new values." - Robinson Jeffers, "The Bloody Sire"

"wore down on their wings" - Robinson Jeffers, "Their Beauty Has More Meaning"

Quotes to inspire creative writing... These quotes were used in February 2008's Free Will Astrology's website. Use ones that inspire you to write. Very Valentine-themed.

Sir Francis Bacon: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."

Elizabeth Barret Browning: "Earth's crammed with heaven."

"The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy. The merest whisper of your name awakes in me a shuddering sixth sense. I am longing for a kiss that makes time stand still." (The preceding testimony is a blend of words from Edgar Allan Poe, Pamela Moore, and John Keats.)

Henri Nouwen: "Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity."

George Bernard Shaw: "You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you."

Tom Robbins: "We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."

"truths in their wild state" (philosopher Gilles Deleuze's phrase)

Richard Moss: "The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention."

Paul Tillich: "The first duty of love is to listen."

Scholar Suzanne Juhasz says that Emily Dickinson's eroticism "inflects and charges" most of her poems. "Erotic desire -- sensuous, nuanced, flagrant, extreme, outlandish, and profound -- is her way of interacting with the world."

Andrew Varnon: "Be my ruckus, my perfect non-sequitur. Be my circuit-breaker, my lengthening shadows at dusk, my nest of pine needles, my second-story window. Be my if-you-stare-long-enough-you'll-see. Be my subatomic particle. Be my backbeat, my key of C minor, my surly apostle, my scandalous reparté, my maximum payload. Be my simmering, seething, flickering, radiating, shimmering, and undulating."

"The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them," wrote novelist Margaret Atwood. "There ought to be as many for love."

"delirium of solutions" (William Carlos Williams' phrase)

Leo Tolstoy: "Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love."

Charles Caleb Colton: "If you cannot inspire a woman with love of you, fill her above the brim with love of herself; all that runs over will be yours."

"One should always be in love," said Oscar Wilde.

South African poet Shabbir Banoobhai: "Love is a mystery. And the reason why it is a mystery and should remain a mystery is that knowledge of it would give us mastery over it -- would enable us to manipulate it -- and love, truth, God, cannot be manipulated. Hence the Prophet exclaimed, 'My Lord, increase my bewilderment in Thee.'"

Teilhard de Chardin: "Some day after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity," said de Chardin, "we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, humans will have discovered fire."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but looking outward together in the same direction."

Marge Piercy in her poem "The Real Hearth": "Let's heat up the night to a boil. Let's cook every drop of liquid out of our flesh till we sizzle, not a drop of come left. We are pots on too high a flame. Our insides char and flake dark like sinister snow idling down. We breathe out smoke. We die out and sleep covers us in ashes. We lie without dreaming, empty as clean grates. Yet we wake rebuilt, clattering and hungry as waterfalls leaping off, rushing into the day, roaring our bright intentions. It is the old riddle in the Yiddish song, what can burn and not burn up, a passion that gives birth to itself every day."

Thoreau: "There is no remedy for love but to love more"

Pascal: "If you do not love too much, you do not love enough."

W. Somerset Maugham: "We are not the same person this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person."

Iris Murdoch: "People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is unlike the original."

Ursula K. Le Guin: "Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."

Andre Maurois: "A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day."

Ezra Pound: "What thou lovest well remains,/ the rest is dross/ What thou lov'st well shall not be reft of thee/ What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage. . .

Pablo Neruda, "Love Sonnet XI": "I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps . . . [I] hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond . . . I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes. And I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens . . . ."

Turkish proverb: "To prepare for love, learn to run through snow, leaving no footprints."

Italian proverb: "Love rules without rules."

Sark: "Love imperfectly. Be a love idiot. Let yourself forget any love ideal."

Carl Sandburg: "Love asks you beautiful, unanswerable questions."

Franz Rosenzweig: "Love brings to life whatever is dead around us."

Rainer Maria Rilke: "Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

Erma Freesman: "Love is the only game where two can play and both win."

Pablo Neruda: "Love is like a well in the wilderness where time watches over the wandering lightning."

Marnie Reed Crowell: "To keep a fire burning brightly," she says, "Keep the two logs together, near enough to keep each other warm and far enough apart -- about a finger's breadth -- for breathing room. Good fire, good marriage, same rule."