Ted Morgan > Ted's Quotes

“The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.”
― Helen Dunmore

“They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin. But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?”
― Helen Dunmore, The Siege

“We are creatures of story.”
― Helen Dunmore

“I don’t know how you humans ever get anything done, you ask so many questions.”
― Helen Dunmore, Ingo

“The Duration

Here they are are on the beach where the boy played
for fifteen summers, before he grew too old
for French cricket, shrimping and rock pools.

Here is the place where he built his dam
year after year. See, the stream still comes down
just as it did, and spreads itself on the sand

into a dozen channels. How he enlisted them:
those splendid spades, those sunbonneted girls
furiously shoring up the ramparts.

Here they are on the beach, just as they were
those fifteen summers. She has a rough towel
ready for him. The boy was always last out of the water.

She would rub him down hard, chafe him like a foal
up on its legs for an hour and trembling, all angles.
She would dry carefully between his toes.

Here they are on the beach, the two of them
sitting on the same square of mackintosh,
the same tartan rug. Quality lasts.

There are children in the water, and mothers patrolling
the sea's edge, calling them back
from the danger zone beyond the breakers.

How her heart would stab when he went too far out.
Once she flustered into the water, shouting
until he swam back. He was ashamed of her then.

Wouldn't speak, wouldn't look at her even.
Her skirt was sopped. She had to wring out the hem.
She wonders if Father remembers.

Later, when they've had their sandwiches
she might speak of it. There are hours yet.
Thousands, by her reckoning.”
― Helen Dunmore

“You live in the past,’ Kate said. ‘You live in your grandfather’s time.’ But she was wrong. The past was not something we could live in, because it had nothing to do with life. It was something we lugged about, as heavy as a sack of rotting apples.”
― Helen Dunmore, A Spell of Winter

“The art of hiding in plain sight used to be second nature, and now it has become the whole of him”
― Helen Dunmore

“In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.”
― Yosa Buson

“No trail to follow
where the teacher has wandered off-
the end of autumn.”
― Yosa Buson

“The behavior of the pigeon
is beyond reproach,
but the mountain cuckoo?”
― Yosa Buson, Haiku Master Buson

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.”
― Matsuo Bashō

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.”
― Basho

“Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.”
― Basho

“The moon and sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
― Basho

“If I had the knack
I'd sing like
Cherry flakes falling”
― Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
― Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

“So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Keep passing the open windows.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“Nihilism remains partial until it is realized that the reductio ad hominem56 is actually a reductio hominis. “The night brought on by the death of God is a night in which every individual identity perishes. When the heavens are darkened, and God disappears, man does not stand autonomous and alone. He ceases to stand. Or, rather, he ceases to stand out from the world and himself, ceases to be autonomous and apart. No longer can selfhood and self-consciousness stand purely and solely upon itself: no longer can a unique and individual identity stand autonomously upon itself. The death of the transcendence of God embodies the death of all autonomous selfhood, an end of all humanity which is created in the image of the absolutely sovereign and transcendent God.”
― Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology

“When understood in all its rich complexity, religion does not simply provide secure foundations but destabilizes every type of religiosity by subverting the oppositional logic of eitherjor.”
― Mark C. Taylor, After God

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
― Charles Darwin

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation”
― Charles Darwin

“It is greed that makes us human as it could be for good or bad.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“In living this way, we discover new opportunities for comfort and enjoyment. Where the younger person may have tossed and turned throughout a sleepless night, the older man or woman can possibly feel the pleasure that comes from lying on a good mattress, resting one's weary bones and overcharged intellect, whether or not one sleeps throughout the hours of darkness.”
― Irving Singer, The Harmony of Nature and Spirit

“Santayana speaks of men and women being propelled toward one another by material forces that control their appetites, their desires, their sexual inclinations. He then goes on to show how different all this is once love intervenes. In an imaginative act the lover uses the beloved as a reminder of some ideal object that she approximates. His love expresses a dual devotion: first to the ideal object, itself an effect of man's imagination; and second to the beloved, whom he appreciates as the partial embodiment of beauty or goodness.”
― Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther

“If learning to think is learning to resist a future that presents itself as obvious, plausible, and normal, we cannot do so either by evoking an abstract future, from which everything subject to our disapproval has been swept aside, or by referring to a distant cause that we could and should imagine to be free of any compromise. To resist a likely future in the present is to gamble that the present still provides substance for resistance, that it is populated by practices that remain vital even if none of them has escaped the generalized parasitism that implicates them all.”
― Isabelle Stengers

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
― Shakespeare William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream