Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world. To learn to be silent like the oak and the linden of the fable. To learn to see. Your glance scattered seeds. It planted a tree. I talk because you shake its leaves.
(paz)
I don't know what it is, but I distrust myself when I start to like a girl a lot. It makes me nervous. I don't say the right things or perhaps I start to examine, evaluate, compute what I am saying. If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?" and she says, "I don't know," I start thinking: Does she really like me? In other words I get a little creepy. A friend of mine once said, "It's twenty times better to be friends with someone than it is to be in love with them." I think he's right and besides, it's raining somewhere, programming flowers and keeping snails happy. That's all taken care of. BUT if a girl likes me a lot and starts getting real nervous and suddenly begins asking me funny questions and looks sad if I give the wrong answers and she says things like, "Do you think it's going to rain?" and I say, "It beats me," and she says, "Oh," and looks a little sad at the clear blue California sky, I think: Thank God, it's you, baby, this time instead of me. (brautigan)
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.
(auden)
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie, A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly. Ask me a riddle and I reply Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie. Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie, Why does a chicken? I don't know why. Ask me a riddle and I reply Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie. Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie, A fish can't whistle and neither can I. Ask me a riddle and I reply Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie. (milne)
My little one whose tongue is dumb, whose fingers cannot hold to things, who is so mercilessly young, he leaps upon the instant things, I hold him not. Indeed, who could? He runs into the burning wood. Follow, follow if you can! He will come out grown a man and not remember whom he kissed, who caught him by the slender wrist and bound him by a tender yoke which, understanding not, he broke.
(Tennessee Williams)
When the heart
Is cut or cracked or broken
Do not clutch it
Let the wound lie open
Let the wind
From the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt
Let a stray dog lick it
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring
Let it go. Let it out.
Let it all unravel.
Let it free and it can be
A path on which to travel.
(Leunig)