Robinson Jeffers

There is something within us knows our fates from the first, our ends from the very fountain; and we in our nights may overhear its knowledge by accident, all to no purpose.

St. Isaac the Syrian

If you cannot be merciful, at least speak as though you are a sinner. If you are not a peacemaker, at least do not be a troublemaker. If you cannot be assiduous, at least in your thought be like a sluggard. If you are not victorious, do not exalt yourself over the vanquished. If you cannot close the mouth of a man who disparages his companion, at least refrain from joining him in this.

The Grapes of Wrath

The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s a monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

The Baron in the Trees

This gesture of moving the branch as if waiting for another land to appear, this plunging of his gaze deeper and deeper into the undulating distance as if hoping never to see the horizon, but to succeed, perhaps, in making out some place, alas, far too far away — this was the first real sign of exile…

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

The Unnameable

[T]hat’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

The Martian Chronicles

What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing.”