Skip to main content

Archives - May 2001

May 1, 2001

The word May is a perfumed word. It is an illuminated initial. It means youth, love, song, and all that is beautiful in life.

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, journal entry for 1 May 1861

May 2, 2001

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means

– Oscar Wilde, <em>The Importance of Being Earnest</em>

May 3, 2001

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

– Jimmy Carter, <em>An Outdoor Journal</em>

May 4, 2001

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

– John Keats, <em>On the Grasshopper and the Cricket</em>

May 5, 2001

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.

– Susan Sontag

May 6, 2001

Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

– Vladimir Nabokov, <em>The Gift</em>

May 7, 2001

Where flowers bloom so does hope.

– Lady Bird Johnson

May 8, 2001

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

– Carol Joyce Oates, National Book Awards (1969)

May 9, 2001

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.

– Katherine Hepburn

May 10, 2001

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

– Claude Monet

May 11, 2001

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

– Fran Lebowitz

May 12, 2001

You are the bows from which your children are as living arrows sent forth.

– Kahlil Gibrain, <em>The Prophet</em>

May 13, 2001

All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

– Abraham Lincoln

May 14, 2001

Making the decision to have a child-its momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

– Elizabeth Stone

May 15, 2001

The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.

– Anton Chekhov

May 16, 2001

Hard is the heart that loved naught in May.

– Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Romance of The Rose"

May 17, 2001

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds 'round my neck.

– Emma Goldman

May 18, 2001

One swallow does not make a spring; neither does one fine day.

– Aristotle, <em>Nichomachean Ethics</em>

May 19, 2001

Soldiers generally win battles; generals generally get credit for them.

– Napoleon Bonaparte

May 20, 2001

Exercise your words. Try them out in new relationships.

– William Sloane

May 21, 2001

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.

– George Eliot

May 22, 2001

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

– Paul Valery, <em>Tel Quel</em>

May 23, 2001

Every vice has its excuse ready.

– Publilius, <em>Moral Sayings</em>

May 24, 2001

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, <em>Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke</em>

May 25, 2001

Men have become the tools of their tools.

– Henry David Thoreau, <em>Walden</em>

May 26, 2001

What is a weed?  A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, <em>Fortune of the Republic</em>

May 27, 2001

If we don't end war, war will end us.

– H.G. Wells, <em>Things to Come</em>

May 28, 2001

To the ashes of the dead, glory comes to late.

– Martial, <em>Epigrams</em>

May 29, 2001

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

– William Makepeace Thackery, <em>The Four Georges</em>

May 30, 2001

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture.

– Henri Matisse, <em>Notes d'un Peintre</em>

May 31, 2001

...Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.

– William Wordsworth, <em>Intimations of Immortality</em>