[A]s an English major, I must confess the love affair that I have with words. I often hear people criticize language; perhaps it is true that words can only convey so much, but in my reading experience, I have found a few quotes that have changed my life, made me laugh, think or simply smile. I would like to honour these people's words now by placing them on my favourite quotes list.



Solid as the ground is firm, but ever so once in a while, he'd get a funny look about him, like he'd just seen a piskie sticking its little brown head around the doorpost, and he wouldn't talk then for a while--at least he wouldn't say much that made sense. But I never heard a man not make sense so eloquently as Bill Dunthorn could when he was of a mind to do so, and there was more than once he had me half believing in what he was saying.
~~Charles deLint, The Little Country

[TropicI love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste the pleasure of
believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.
~~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Julian and Maddalo"

She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And even fewer to love.
~~William Wordsworth, "Ruth"


A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
~~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist"		[Sun

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying--
Lady make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

~~Dorothy Parker, "Unfortunate Coincidence"
 Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the
darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.
~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Theologian's Tale"

"People!" he declared again and again. "Learn about people--how they think, what they feel. The rhythms of their minds and hearts and bodies. What they'll give their lives for--and what they'll put up with. Learn people in all their wisdom and folly, their honor and cravenness, their courage and cowardice. Learn how to read them in an eyeblink--and how not to make snap judgements!"

~~Melanie Rawn, Exiles: Volume I: The Ruins of Ambrai

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
~~William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"
[Shore]

Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.
~~Bible, I Corinthians, 13:4		 But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.
~~Bible, Matthew 8:22

[Hills Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be take.
~~William Shakespeare, sonnet 116

I know now why you cry; it is something I can never do.
~~Arnold Schwarzenegger,
"Terminator 2"
Half the quarrels in this world come about because one side or the other simply isn't listening.
~~Charles deLint, The Little Country


She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
~~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Lady of Shalott"


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