Vivian Little > Vivian Little's Quotes

“So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.”
― John Updike

“I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.”
― Pablo Neruda

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“It was the last night that she would
breathe the same air as he, or look out over the deep sea and up into the star-blue heaven. A dreamless,
eternal night awaited her, for she had no soul and had not been able to win one.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid and Other Tales

“Don't cry when the sun is gone, because the tears won't let you see the stars.”
― Violeta Parra

“Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words”
― William Faulkner

“To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“we lived in the gaps between the stories”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“a handful of crumpled stars”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
― Tennessee Williams, Conversations With Tennessee Williams

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“She inhabited a world from which I was excluded, and she had left me in an immense empty space.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“I am your moon and your moonlight too
I am your flower garden and your water too
I have come all this way, eager for you
Without shoes or shawl
I want you to laugh
To kill all your worries
To love you
To nourish you.”
― Rumi

“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Who could be so lucky? Who comes to a lake for water and sees the reflection of moon.”
― Rumi

“The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.”
― Edward Thomas

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.”
― Nick Hornby

“She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.”
― William Faulkner, The Town

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.”
― Nick Hornby

“What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.”
― Adam Smith, The Money Game

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”
― Lao Tzu

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss