And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?
--Jack Kerouac, The Town And The City

My witness is the empty sky.
--Jack Kerouac

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

I met a reverend mother once who cried...'ah, it's all so sad' 
- 'What did she cry about?' 
- 'I don't know, after talking to me, I remember I said some silly thing like "the universe is a woman because it's round" but I think she cried because she was remembering her early days when she had a romance with some soldier who died, at least that's what they say, she was the greatest woman I ever saw, big blue eyes, big smart woman ... you could do that, get out of this awful mess and leave it all behind.
--Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: "Why?" He replied: "Because no one admired me."
--Stephen Crane, Complete Poems Of Stephen Crane

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.
--James Joyce, Dubliners

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.
--Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.
--Toni Morrison, Beloved

I'll never be ready. Yet at the same time, you always want to reach the end. You can't fly to a destination and linger in the air. I want to reach the end of this thing, and I feel terrible about it.
--Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants

Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn't make…. Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible.
--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

 And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
--Kathryn Stockett, The Help

 I guess that's what the kid feels - She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.
--Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. 
--Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

        He woke with a start. It was cold, but not so cold. He had never slept before on these vigils, but he was old, not quite finished, but nearly finished. He thought of all those that were suffering, of Gertrude the weak and foolish one, of the people of Shanty Town and Alexandra, of his wife now at this moment. But above all of his son, Absalom. Would he be awake, would he be able to sleep, this night before the morning? He cried out, My son, my son, my son.
        With his crying he was now fully awake, and he looked at his watch and saw that it was one o'clock. The sun would rise soon after five, and it was then it was done, they said. If the boy was asleep, then let him sleep, it was better. But if he was awake, then oh Christ of the abundant mercy, be with him.  Over this he prayed long and earnestly.
        Would his wife be awake, and thinking of it? She would have come with him, were it not for the girl. And the girl, why, he had forgotten her. But she was no doubt asleep; she was loving enough, but this husband had given her so little, no more than her others had done.
        And there was Jarvis, bereaved of his wife and his son, and his daughter-in-law bereaved of her husband, and her children bereaved of their father, especially the small boy, the bright laughing boy. The small boy stood there before his eyes, and he said to Kumalo, When I go, something bright will go out of Ndotsheni. Yes, I see, he said. Yes, I see. He was not shy or ashamed, but he said, Yes, I see, and laughed with his pleasure.
        And now for all the people of Africa, the beloved country. Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, God save Africa. But he would not see that salvation. It lay afar off, because men were afraid of it. Because, to tell the truth, they were afraid of him, and his wife, and Msimangu, and the young demonstrator. And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger? That men should walk upright in the land where they were born, and be free to use the fruits of the earth, what was there evil in it? Yet men were afraid, with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, or brought it out with fierceness and anger, and hid it behind fierce and frowning eyes. They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love.
        It was Msimangu who had said, Msimangu who had no hate for any man, I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they turn to loving they will find we are turned to hating.
        Oh, the grave and the somber words.
--Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country

Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.
--Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.
--Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

But he said, in substance, to himself that if the earth and moon were about to clash, many persons would doubtless plan to get upon the roofs to witness the collision.
--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge Of Courage

She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.
--Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.
--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying Of Lot 49

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.
--Alice Munro, Open Secrets

Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"
I didn't say anything.
--Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?
--Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
--Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

So I'm not the world's best blogger...
but I am a reader, always, of both the best and the mundane things.  I collect words, bits of words, lines from novels, stories, parts of poems, whole poems sometimes-sort of like a linguistic magpie.
I return to those words, then, when I am feeling contemplative, or uninspired, or inspired, or driven, or aimless, whether I know what I'm looking for, or if I don't.
And one of the truest things I know-words can save your life.  As we go along-that is, when I remember-I'll post those most meaningful, for whatever reason, to me.  A promise- I will only borrow words from books, poems, that I have actually read. It seems truer that way.
so take this as it's meant, read widely and yet deeply, and find your place somewhere around here.  best, always.

And in one old face, grown suddenly pale, recognition breaks through. Recognition? Is it really just recognition? — Forgiveness. Forgiveness of what? — Love. My God: it is love.
--Rainer Maria Rilke, THE MAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO BE LOVED
full text--http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2011/03/15/the-prodigal-son-by-rainier-maria-rilke/

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums