A story is not like a road to follow...it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

-- Alice Munro, Introduction to Selected Stories

You don't wait for anything. This is not the dress rehearsal; this is it.

-- Parenthood, "It Has To Be Now"

That feeling of not being authentic, of having something to prove: use it.

-- Smash, "Tech"

Well, sometimes dreams are hard.

-- Smash, "Pilot"

So the holy truth of the whole adventure here in India is in one line: God dwells within you, as you. God's not interested in watching a performance of how a spiritual person looks and behaves, the quiet girl who glides silently through the place with a gentle, ethereal smile. Who is that person? It's Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St Mary's, not me. God dwells within me, as me.

-- Eat Pray Love

Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things that speak directly to your soul.

-- Austin Kleon

I think the more personal movies and television shows are, the more universal they become. I feel like if you can be really specific with your life, you think "oh, nobody's going to relate to that," they do. There's an emotional context to those things that sort of make it blow up and become bigger than you could even dream.

-- Ryan Murphy, "Ryan Murphy's Journey with Eat Pray Love"

Someone and no one. That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of the sayable, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really eparate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.

-- Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world.

A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them - but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

-- Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.

-- Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

-- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of yourself, and shake out your darkest feelings, without worrying that people would think you were strange. While I was writing, I would forget myself and everyone else; poetry made me feel part of something noble and beautiful and bigger than me...I slid them under the carpe as soon as they were done, all the images and rhymes wrestled into place. By the time I had copied them out, I found I had memorized every line. Then they would surprise me by surging through me, like songs I knew by heart.

-- Andrea Ashworth, Once in a House on Fire

Our deepest passions push us way outside ourselves.

-- Robert Bringhurst

Poets are people who are not content to say only one thing at a time.

-- Billy Collins

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

-- Thomas Babington Macaulay

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable...I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.

-- Mark Doty

[Am I allowed to just quote this to my supervisor every time he asks me to summarize a poem?]

Too often we are asked for the facts, the proof of what happened before, so we can justify with certainty what will happen next. By doing so, we modify our curiosity to focus on reporting the news versus making it. We begin to train ourselves to be historians rather than history makers. We become the victims of other people's thinking instead of discovering and developing our own unique and authentic point of view. We search for certainty, and by doing so we make certain the outcome of our journey will lack any sense of adventure or discovery. Then we sit back and wonder, "What happened?" when a colleague or competitor passes us by and redefine our reality. We are encouraged to turn off the bright light of curiosity to live in the shadows of certainty, reducing our risk of losing, while making certain that winning will never be in our future.

-- Gary Friedman, Restoration Hardware Objects of Curiosity Spring 2013 catalogue

There are some poets whose body of work reads like a single poem: an ongoing, deepening dialogue with the self and the world that is divided into separate poems, as if only for convenience. Consistency of voice, consistency of form, will create this impression; so will a body of work that eschews narrative or embeds it in a looping, ranging, open-ended development. Mainly, however, it is the pervasiveness of a poet's obsessions, the regular recurrence of key images and ideas, which tends to meld many poems into one.

-- Carol Moldaw, review of Poems by Anne Michaels

Tom, do you honestly think I have never thought about all of this before? I made a decision to do what I love to do, and I accept everything that comes along with that. Whatever happens next, I accept it. This is what theatre is; it is joy one day, and it's gone the next. It's like a religion, and I don't apologize for wanting to be a part of that, and I don't wish for something more. I really don't.

-- Smash, "Tech"

Art isn't therapy. We're not here to work out our personal problems. We're here to take those problems and completely exploit them, to hell with how much we hurt. Actually, the more we hurt, the better.

-- Smash, "Bombshell"