Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Passages. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Passages Quotes And Sayings by 97 Authors including Alton Tobey,Lailah Gifty Akita,Anthony Doerr,James Martineau,Terry Tempest Williams for you to enjoy and share.
In the Fragments, sensations are more profound and richly clarified through deliberate and explicit pattern; emotions are given a sequence and development such as the exigencies of practical life rarely permit.
Sacred solitude; reading, wondering and writing.
Firelit rooms lined with books - these are the places in which important things happen.
When speech is given to a soul holy and true, time, and its dome of ages, becomes as a mighty whispering-gallery, round which the imprisoned utterance runs, and reverberates forever.
Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.
Between a book's covers there may be passion, bile, mayhem, or murder, but in the quiet spaces where it awaits its fate (either acceptance of indifference) all is calm.
Life, wherever it reveals itself; truth, no matter how bitter; bold, sincere speech with people - these are my leaven, these are what I want, this is where I am afraid of missing the mark.
What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once.There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. When seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep.
There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence in the meaning and significance of life. Such courage is an underground river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one's experience, keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.
So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had
gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing
incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if
plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
In torment, there was release.
In the darkness, there was light.
In solitude, there were companions.
Forth from the war emerging,a book I have made, the words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything, a book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect, but you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.
If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.
The tumults of time are oft passed by in records of the private memoirist; for our days consist not of the Senatorial speech and the refracted solar beam cast through heroic cloud, but rather of bread eaten, and ink blotted, and talk of the sermon, and walks along the whiskery avenues in the garden.
Silence blew from the hole she had dug like smoke. She could feel what lay just beyond. The new countryside. The unspeaking multitude. Steeples and arches of bone; temples of silence. She felt the great shapes that moved there, majestic and unfurled, utterly silent, utterly dark.
On a surface level, all one finds is repeated forms of shallow whispers. Having the courage to explore deeply, a wealth of buried infinite lifetimes emerge - an undeniable force.
Rest, v. and n.
Rest with me for the rest of this.
That's it. Come closer.
We're here.
We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
Life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness, one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.
They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain.
Space for the Spirit to breathe.
What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.
Memories like shrapnel, forever embedded, infected by what had come later ... words of love and undying devotion, times of sublime happiness, lies upon lies upon lies ... his attention kept sliding away from the stories he was reading.
What it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold.
... my private thoughts, feelings I captured with a tortured mind and hammered into sentences I shoved into paragraphs, ideas I pinned together with punctuation marks that serve no function but to determine where one thought ends and another begins.
The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness:
In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration.
Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.
At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.
In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.
Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.
Over time, each day has become another stretch on an endless pilgrimage road. The terrain of this sacred journey has become fluid and ever-shifting. Every step of the way is an arrival, but not a place to linger.
Metaphorically these essays move as a quiet but observant coast-guard cutter among the rocks and islands up and down the littoral of our life.
This volume follows in the same format as its predecessors, except that, at the suggestion of two reviewers of a previous volume, Biblical verses are identified, when recognized, for the benefit of our un-Biblical younger generation.
(E)very soul requires secret places for contemplation as well as open spaces for celebration.
Things denied, things untold, things hidden and disguised.
Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
This book is written in
a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance.
An extra pressure, a silent rebuke, an unseen praising, a firm correction: all these passed between us as through telegraph wires.
If I can bring anyone into that hall [creeds], I have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms [confessions], not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals.7
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
Thoroughly to unfold the labyrinths of the human mind is an arduous task ... In order to dive into those recesses and lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner, 'tis necessary to assume a certain freedom in writing, not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules.
I sense a Threshold: Light to Silence, Silence to Light - an ambiance of inspiration, in which the desire to be, to express, crosses with the possible Light to Silence, Silence to Light crosses in the sanctuary of art.
Should you dare to ride this dreadful beast, you would awaken later as if from a deep sleep, with some of these printed scraps clutched in your hands. Fragments would hint at ideal books, impossible books, books that you have always longed to read.
My mind was bursting with depression and anguish. I muttered imprecations and murmuring as I passed along. I was full of loathing and abhorrence of life, and all that life carries in its train.
Solitude, a time for memories, a time to dream, a time for passions to simmer quietly in the dark recesses of the mind, eager to fly yet merely reflections in the minds eye...
At every moment I convinced myself that I was gathering material for the novel of my life - all experienced from the philosophical distance of the author. Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material. Life was a field trip.
The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.
A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.
... in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face "lit up by a divine light"
and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul
slips through.
Paths. Curiosities lurked around every corner. A man belched flames from a podium. The scent of fried cakes and popcorn hung sweet and heavy on the air, tantalizing until it became sickening. And
... the warm glazes, the sparkling penumbra of the room itself and, through the little window framed with honeysuckle, in the rustic avenue, the resilient dryness of the sun-parched earth, veiled only by the diaphanous gauze woven of distance and the shade of the trees.
The pleasant books, that silently among Our household treasures take familiar places, And are to us as if a living tongue Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces!
Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.
Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks.
A period recourse into the wilds is not a retreat into secret silent sanctums to escape a wicked world, it is to take breath amid effort to forge a better world.
The secret passages of life are simply magnificent! You can continue walking without being noticed, far away from all the perils!
what they had endured
Listening to all words
the silent words of nature, the words of friends and enemies, and the words of scripture
can become an exercise in human yearning and divine response, flowing in and out of one's life like a river current.
Learning comes from books; penetration of a mystery from suffering.
Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far, The voice divine of human loyalty.
Reading was a kind of freedom, the only one I could give
Where, as again Vaughan writes, the liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies.
Beyond speech and mind,
Into the river of ever-effulgent Light
My heart dives.
Today thousands of doors, closed for millennia,
Are opened wide.
I see this land flowing with books, Father. Widespread literacy. Books everywhere, as common as they used to be in circulation before the Crossing, affordable even for the poor.
Through the dripping weeks that follow One another slow, and soak Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.
The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
I tried to make everything breathe in this painting: faith, quiet suffering, religious and primitive style, and great nature with its scream.
The nunneries of silent nooks, the murmured longing of the wood.
But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia.
Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.
Victory, union, faith, identity, time, Yourself, the present and future lands, the indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports. This, then, is life;
Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.
Within a bony labrinthean cave, Reached by the pulse of the aerial wave, This sibyl, sweet, and Mystic Sense is found, Muse, that presides o'er all the Powers of Sound.
Their sighing, canting, grace-proud faces, their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces.
In quiet we had learn'd to dwell-
Myvery chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends-
To make us what we are:-even I
Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.
Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)
Quiet Spaces
We had gone far enough together to listen easily in the quiet spaces.
When going out of your material body, after the return, the courage becomes so great that you can tread on things that can take the life of a materialist.
The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory?
Spirit, find your way, in seeking lowness like a stream.
By and by ... there are more and more gaps of silence. Through those gaps, windows will open to the divine.
This passage and escaped via the cafeteria or
What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.
The book depicts thoughts, unveils imaginings, answers unspoken questions, clarifies doubts, resolves arguments, and finally reveals the very atoms of the most curiosity-driven desire.
There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
Lectio, quae placuit, decies repetita placebit.
(What we read with pleasure we can read many times with pleasure.)
How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.
Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.
Door of passage to the other side, the soul frees itself in stride.
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
This was the setting in which the most troubled and most precious days of my life were lived: an abode from which our adventurings flowed out, to flow back again like waves breaking on a lonely headland.
The walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight ...
My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
Pipes filled with brine that spied on the inhabitants of buildings watching, listening, hunting. You might obscure the attention of the Londonmancers, with the complicity of a treacherous borough, with strikebreaking hexes strong enough: but nothing could stay hidden from an inquisitive sea.
Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.