“You may have experienced failure in the past, yet if you utilize the lessons learnt to make an impact, you will eventually become a success in life.”
Source: The Kind of Substance You Need For Your Success
“My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean.”
Source: White Oleander
“It's like raking leaves in the wind.”
“When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.”
Source: Rooms
“Denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it's never taking your car out of the garage. It's safe in there, but you'll never go anywhere.”
Source: Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution
“Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.”
Source: The Poems of Norman MacCaig
“There's a big luscious peach of a dream in L.A. The peach has been repeatedly exposed as overripe and tainted with wormholes... but it's still the only giant peach in town. Even if it's wet-brown and crawling with centipedes, everyone wants their bite.”
Source: A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations
“I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...”
Source: The Killing Doll
“But I came to see that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor.”
Source: Children of Las Vegas: True Stories of Growing up in the World's Playground
“The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.”
Source: Everything You Say Is Goodbye