Arabian Nights Quotes

It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing it first above the tops of trams and above the great scars of modern advertising along the river frontage, it seemed a once beautiful theatre-set that modern Turkey had thrown aside in favour of the steel and concrete flat-iron of the Istanbul-Hilton Hotel, blankly glittering behind him on the heights of Pera. ~ Ian Fleming

There's a whole slew of wonderful speculation of flying in a fanciful way. Gulliver is one of the central examples; Swift has the hum of Arabian Nights in his ear with Gulliver's Travels. The difference is in scale - Gulliver as a kind of Sinbad kind of figure, the way he is picked up and carried. Just to finish up with Scheherazade, I do think that The Arabian Nights could be considered as a great book on women's position in the world. ~ Marina Warner

Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities. ~ Marina Warner

It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling star: but even so
and all the more
what marvelous creatures we are! What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians! It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is
blind or not
a good world to live in, a promising universe. ~ Clarence Day Jr.

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.' ~ Salman Rushdie

It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Nights marvels. ~ Edith Wharton

To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment. ~ William Osler

Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again. He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking Company," with two screens, a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana actually threw him an abandoned black overall or working dress on which to exercise the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress. And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle (with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up; and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden in the "Arabian Nights." A pang too swift to be named pain or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier. He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering ~ G.K. Chesterton

Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she's also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There's a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans. ~ Marina Warner

Marvelous wonders don't have to happen of a sudden, the way they do in the Arabian Nights. They can also take a long time, like crystals growing, or minds changing, or leaves turning. The trick is to keep an eye peeled, so they don't slip by unappreciated. ~ Ken Kesey

In this way he continued until he was fourteen years of age, when his extraordinary destiny took him by the hand, and led him, step by step, through adventures so wonderful that words can scarce describe them. ~ Arabian Nights

Then how does one go about making the impossible, possible ? ~ Renee Ahdieh

Now that I am burned out and I'll never
accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching
classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for
pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without
worrying about any importance whatsoever. ~ Richard Feynman

We shall remember ...... Damascus, the "Pearl of the East", the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights,the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten ~ Mark Twain

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought.
Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind. ~ Tahir Shah

If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairty tale from the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. ~ Henry David Thoreau

There were also books of fairy tales, The Arabian Nights, James Payn's work, Anthony Trollope's Vicar of Bullhampton, Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies, a pile of Wilkie Collins - The New Magdalen, The Law and the Lady, The Two Destinies, and a new Jules Verne novel titled Child of the Cavern that she itched to get her hands on. And then, there it was - A Tale of Two Cities. ~ Cassandra Clare

Obviously, we have to start with some basic definition of the hero and the heroic ideal. [...] I was saddened to find that, as an eldest child and a girl, I was barred fro heroism entirely--or was I? [In Scheharazade's The Arabian Nights] The log of wood was a girl, and she most heroically set things to right. Good. It was possible for a girl to be a hero then. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career ~ Pat Conroy

How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find ho ~ Wirt Gerrare

When you read The Arabian Nights you accept Islam. You accept the fables woven by generations as if they were by one single author or, better still, as if they had no author. And in fact they have one and none. Something so worked on, so polished by generations is no longer associated with and individual. In Kafka's case, it's possible that his fables are now part of human memory. What happened to Quixote could happen to to them. Let's say that all the copies of Quixote, in Spanish and in translation, were lost. The figure of Don Quixote would remain in human memory. I think that the idea of a frightening trial that goes on forever, which is at the core of The Castle and The Trial (both books that Kafka, of course, never wanted to publish because he knew they were unfinished), is now grown infinite, is now part of human memory and can now be rewritten under different titles and feature different circumstances. Kafka's work now forms a part of human memory. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons. ~ Ted Chiang

Not very long after this a very exciting thing happened. Not only Sara, but the entire school, found it exciting, and made it the chief subject of conversation for weeks after it occurred. In one of his letters Captain Crewe told a most interesting story. A friend who had been at school with him when he was a boy had unexpectedly come to see him in India. He was the owner of a large tract of land upon which diamonds had been found, and he was engaged in developing the mines. If all went as was confidently expected, he would become possessed of such wealth as it made one dizzy to think of; and because he was fond of the friend of his school days, he had given him an opportunity to share in this enormous fortune by becoming a partner in his scheme. This, at least, was what Sara gathered from his letters. It is true that any other business scheme, however magnificent, would have had but small attraction for her or for the schoolroom; but "diamond mines" sounded so like the Arabian Nights that no one could be indifferent. Sara thought them enchanting, and painted pictures, for Ermengarde and Lottie, of labyrinthine passages in the bowels of the earth, where sparkling stones studded the walls and roofs and ceilings, and strange, dark men dug them out with heavy picks. Ermengarde delighted in the story, and Lottie insisted on its being retold to her every evening. Lavinia was very spiteful about it, and told Jessie that she didn't believe such things as diamond mines existed. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining, and the account of men living to eight and nine hundred years becomes as fabulous as the immortality of the giants of the Mythology. ~ Thomas Paine

Now "The Arabian Nights," some of which, but not nearly all, are given in this volume, are only fairy tales of the East. The people of Asia, Arabia, and Persia told them in their own way, not for children, but for grown-up people. There were no novels then, nor any printed books, of course; but there were people whose profession it was to amuse men and women by telling tales. They dressed the fairy stories up, and made the characters good Mahommedans, living in Bagdad or India. The events were often supposed to happen in the reign of the great Caliph, or ruler of the Faithful, Haroun al Raschid, who lived in Bagdad in 786-808 A.D. The vizir who accompanies the Caliph was also a real person of the great family of the Barmecides. He was put to death by the Caliph in a very cruel way, nobody ever knew why. The stories must have been told in their present shape a good long while after the Caliph died, when nobody knew very exactly what had really happened. At last some storyteller thought of writing down the tales, and fixing them into a kind of framework, as if they had all been narrated to a cruel Sultan by his wife. Probably the tales were written down about the time when Edward I. was fighting Robert Bruce. But changes were made in them at different times, and a great deal that is very dull and stupid was put in, and plenty of verses. Neither the verses nor the dull pieces are given in this book. ~ Muhsin Mahdi

I would lay awake nights and cry a lot thinking, is my dad gonna come home? Is he gonna go to jail again? Is he going to get killed? ~ Victoria Gotti

...During my first few hours in Loja, I had good fortune to run into two young Mormon missionaries who let me sleep one night in their room and three further nights at their temple. My four days in Loja were somber ones, however, not so much because of the Mormons, who didn't try to convert me (at least not very strenuously), but because of the constant rain. ~ George Meegan

I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her even the useless arguments were things ever splendid and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said: I love you. ~ Charles Bukowski

The key, Dinesh said, is to have friends who hang out in different groups in different places, and to mix up the nights so that you're spending some time with all of them. Whether it's in church, with volunteer groups, at office parties, or on a sports field, it's always a place where people meet organically. ~ Aziz Ansari

Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal"

You'll come to hate your own poems,
read them as pretty wisps of colorful thinking,
all those images just a splash of colored oil
sloshed over a pool gone rancid. Admit it.
Atheists always scared you. And no wonder.
Those nights you switched on the fan so no one
could hear you scream into your pillow, weeping
and biting your own hands like a motherless
monkey,banded to a body that despised you,
a suit of coals with a jammed-shut zipper.
Instead of the truth, you took refuge in stories
and souls, wore the word survivor like a pink nimbus.
All the while, my dear, I waited, knowing
you'd catch up to me one day. I'm holding the black-
backed mirror to your face. Look into it. ~ Anya Krugovoy Silver

I counted his failings in my head: his obnoxious, cocky attitude; his pierced and painted wannabe girlfriend; his leather jacket and black motorcycle; his tattoos and multiple piercings. Even his name rankled. Dante. I'd spent my formative years dodging his type. I refused to be intimidated by him. That poncy lot. I seethed some more. And geeks? Surely he could come up with something more original. My entire year's work depended on a successful outcome here, and Tristan had assured me this guy was the real deal, not just another charlatan. We only had two night's use of the control tower. As of next week, it was scheduled for demolition. I'd convinced myself Dante was just a means to an end, and then he smiled at me, his hard, uncompromising face lighting up for just a second. With his sharp cheekbones and proud chin, he looked almost beautiful, and my stomach turned cartwheels. His eyes glittered like diamonds, pale silver that appeared luminous in the badly lit room. ~ Sofia Grey

But the Can Man is still touched in the head, and on nights when the world closes in on him, he still gets down on his hands and knees and howls at the moon. ~ Paul Auster

The hot humid day had followed the sun westward, leaving a cool midnight breeze. The sky, God's special gift to the sailor, was free of city lights and urban pollution. Placed on display, all of creation was set on the night's canopy of blue-black velvet adorned with the glistening diamond dust of billions of lesser stars and the sparkling one-point diamonds of the major stars.

A deep golden harvest moon hung low on the eastern horizon. Its glow cut a pewter path from moon to ship across shifting liquid swells rolling forward to meet the Farnley's bow. The bow, rocking gently, rose, then floated gently down to embrace the next swell. ~ Larry Laswell

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.
Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bay
and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea
against this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.

Here is the symbol, and climbing dark
a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning
over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells
sound for the mariners. Now must we measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See in the gulfs, how small the light of home.

Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tidied up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.

Never from earth again the coolamon
or thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history
that has sunk many islands in its good time. ~ Judith A. Wright

Three nights a week your Lalasa closes her shop early," Buri told her after a sip from her cup. "She teaches city girls--commoners--holds, blows, and kicks that will help them to escape an attacker. She learned all that somewhere. And it does girls more good than your courting frostbite to shoot a bow you don't even like. There's now a demand for arms teachers for young noblewomen. Seven female Riders this year asked me for references to get them such posts. And may I remind you that a particular law is being revised right now because you had the nerve to tell King Jonathan it should be changed?"
"I still should have reported Vinson at the Temple of the Goddess," Kel said stubbornly.
"Very well, you should have done," Buri agreed, her face sober. "Next time, you will. And while it won't heal his victims, here's something for you to drink besides self-pity. No court in the land could put him through what he did to those girls. The Chamber did. I've seen the marks of beatings. The Chamber is making him feel every blow, kick, and punch he doled out. And I bet that will continue for a while. ~ Tamora Pierce

In my time at the Cove, I'd spent many nights scribbling in my journal, attempting to write my way into a solution, into some kind of clarity and acceptance about what I'd lost and where I'd go from here. But maybe clarity was like love, shooting through you when you least expected it, when you'd finally stopped seeking it. ~ Sarah Ockler

On nights it was hard to be in the palace, I would stand outside the manor and watch the lights of your bedroom. The black rose bushes were always in my way. But over time, I began to feel a fondness for them. Seeing a black rose meant was near you, near the one person who understood me. ~ Sara Wolf

A friend. A companion. A beautiful, passionate lover to spend the days and nights with. A woman to carry my children, a partner to share the triumphs and failures. A woman I can share my dreams with, and who will share hers with me. A woman who I can comfort and hold in times of need, and who will hold me when I am weak , and sorrowful, and in need of the sort of succor only a wife can give her husband. A woman who I so desperately want to make love to. You, Lucy, you are that woman. ~ Charlotte Featherstone

Soldier, rest! Thy warfare o'er, Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking, Dream of battled fields no more. Days of danger, nights of waking. ~ Walter Scott

In the deepest nights
words left behind or asleep
may find their connections.
In scattered papers, who knows or forgets them?
Someday perhaps they'll resonate - who knows? -
in a few sympathetic hearts. ~ Vicente Aleixandre

When awful darkness and silence reign Over the great Gromboolian plain, Through the long, long wintry nights; ~ Edward Lear

So where are they now? Your friends, I mean? You're always telling me about your friends and how you would do anything for them because they are your friends and how in return, they would die for you. I didn't believe it then and I'm not believing it now. All of your friends have gone. The good people, YOUR people, that's what you would call them. It was hard to keep from laughing in your face when you talked like that. I always wondered if that's what you thought I was to you, if I was one of YOUR people. You're so full of shit and now it's even too deep for you to deal with. The truth is that you don't have any friends, not now, not ever. You think you're with someone and then you find that you're just alone in a room with a stranger. You spent so much time running away from yourself, fulfilling imaginary duties to your friends, that you don't even know who you are. When the shit comes down, you can't even count on yourself. Isn't that a shame. Get ready for one of the longest nights ever. ~ Henry Rollins

It was one of those rare nights when I was kept awake not by my nightmares and anxieties but by something exciting and exhilarating. Most nights I lay awake waiting for some unexpected disaster ... I think I somehow felt that as long as I was conscious, nothing bad could happen ... ~ Azar Nafisi

Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

We keep looking for justice, but it's nothing but stormy nights and dark alleys out there. ~ Paul Levine

The presidency of the United Nations was not thrust upon me overnight. I had to grow up to the measurements it demanded of a proponent of peace. This was done session by session, step by step. It entailed trips halfway around the world, again and again. It demanded nights without sleep, studying, writing, poring over documents; days without rest; and always the curb on the temper and the willingness to give and to receive. ~ Carlos P. Romulo

If you're going to fight for love, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing that love, money, friends, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean embarrassment. It could mean mockery-- but they are all simply a test of your endurance, of how much you really want it. Her. Him. There are no safety nets in the fight for love.
And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can ever imagine. If you're going to try to fight for love, go all the way. There is no other better feeling than that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will burn with fire. You will ride life like a horse straight down a path of flaming beautiful insanity. It's the only good fight there is left in this world. The fight for love.

There are no losers in the fight for love. Only cowards. ~ Jose N Harris

The mere thought of the Chosen female made him close his eyes and falter his feet on the stairs.
But then he threw off the sting. 'Cuz it was either that or go into a black-hole tailspin. The good news? He'd spent a lot of time over the last nine months trying to pull his mind, his emotions, his soul off the topic of Selena.
So he was used to this kind of power lifting.
Unfortunately, she remained a constant preoccupation, as if he had a low-level fever that dogged him no matter how much he slept and attempted to eat right.
And on some nights, it was a lot more than preoccupation - which was why he'd had to leave the Brotherhood mansion at times and crash back at his condo at the Commodore.
After all, bonded males could be dangerous, and the fact that he wasn't with her - and shouldn't be - meant absolutely nothing to that side of him. Especially when she was feeding fighters who could not, for whatever reason, take their mates' veins.
It was straight-up crazy. ~ J.R. Ward

Until i die there will be these moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming
God grant me the grace to live them
in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the
light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head. ~ James Baldwin

Let me have men about me that are fat,
... Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that." - - Samuel Beckett ~ William Shakespeare

Some nights she drowsed, but never for more than an hour. One day, Melisandre prayed, she would not sleep at all. One day she would be free of dreams. ~ George R R Martin

I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral. ~ Jack Gilbert

All those months Boyd had thought only of Sin. All those times he'd leaned on Sin's memory for strength and conviction. All those nights he'd woken in pain and forced himself to keep going because it was what Sin would have wanted ...
It hurt to know it may mean nothing. ~ Ais

He put off the faith of his childhood quite simply, like a cloak that he no longer needed. At first life seemed strange and lonely without the belief which, though he never realized it, had been an unfailing support. He felt like a man who has leaned on a stick and finds himself forced suddenly to walk without assistance. It really seemed as though the days were colder and the nights more solitary. But he was upheld by the excitement; it seemed to make life a more thrilling adventure; and in a little while the stick which he had throw aside, the cloak which had fallen from his shoulders, seemed an intolerable burden of which he had been eased. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The first day I walked into prison, and he slammed that door, I knew the magnitude of the decision that I made, and the poor judgment, and what I allowed to happen to the animals. And, you know, it's no way of explaining the hurt and the guilt that I felt. And that was the reason I cried so many nights. ~ Michael Vick

O you mad, you superbly drunk!
If you kick open your doors and play the fool in public;
If you empty your bag in a night, and snap your fingers at prudence;
If you walk in curious paths and play with useless things;
Reck not rhyme or reason;
If you break the rudder in two unfurling your sails before the storm:
Then I will follow you, comrade, and be drunken and go to the dogs.

I have wasted my days and nights in the company of steady wise neighbors.
Much knowing has turned my hair grey, and much watching has made my sight dim.
For years I have gathered and heaped all scraps and fragments of things;
Crush them and dance upon them, and scatter them all to the winds!
For I know 'tis the height of wisdom to be drunken and go to the dogs.

Let all crooked scruples vanish, let me hopelessly lose my way.
Let a gust of wild giddiness come and sweep me away from my anchors.
The world is peopled with worthies, and workers useful and clever;
There are men who are easily the first, and men who come decently next:
Let them be happy and prosperous, and let me be foolishly futile.
For I know 'tis the end of all works to be drunken and go to the dogs.

I swear to surrender this moment all claim to the ranks of the sensible.
I let go my pride of learning and judgment of right and of wrong.
I'll shatter the vessel of memory, scattering the last drop of tears; < ~ Rabindranath Tagore

You who have walked with me these seven steps, become my best companion, my dearest friend. We shall share the same gardens, the same sunlight, we shall cross the same threshold, we shall share the same hearth. We shall welcome the same days and the same shy nights. I shall be the sun, you shall be its light; I shall be the light, you shall be its brilliance. I shall be the moon, you shall be its silver. I shall be the earth, you shall be its patience. I shall be the waters, you shall be its sanctity. I shall be the sky, you shall be its stretch of stars, I shall be the wind, you shall be its centre, I shall be all the seasons, you shall be their promise. For you, I shall be the lampflame, you shall be my stillness. ~ Poile Sengupta

Different kinds of tired:

1. All day at the beach sleepy. Warm skin. Wet hair. Salt and sand and green-apple scented shampoo. Bed sheet tides pulling up and down stomach flips into mermaid dreams.

2. Milky tired. Early nights. Wondering if you are getting sick. Medicine light bones. Eyelids melting closed. Dizzy, dizzy, spinning into sleep.

3. Drowsy car rides. Soft radio buzz. Pillow on the window. Pulling on your seatbelt. Waking up and not knowing where you are. ~ Unknown

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether as learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison to all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right hand she crooks a finger, smiling,
How many the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow if falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:Robert Graves