A Quote by Richard Rodriguez

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

Richard Rodriguez

Quote Topics

Away Close Crowd Dark Death Deny Doors Faces Family Finally Intimacy Language Leave Move Passes Room Stand Through Time Time Passes Trapped Truth Truth Is Voice Voices Way Window Within Words

Quote Author

Richard Rodriguez
American - Writer
Born: July 31, 1944

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

Robert Morgan

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.

Yoko Ono

Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.

Honore de Balzac

It is too often believed that a person in his progress towards perfection passes from error to truth; that when he passes on from one thought to another, he must necessarily reject the first. But no error can lead to truth. The soul passing through its different stages goes from truth to truth, and each stage is true; it goes from lower truth to higher truth.

Swami Vivekananda

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.

Clive Barker

I'm my biggest critic. I want there to be no flaws when you hear it. When I think that maybe it's ready, I just hop in my car it's gotta have some bump - and go to corner stores, youngsters on the block, play it for anyone. If they get into it, I get a reaction, the song passes the hyphy test. If it's just cool, we throw it away; it's not going on the record. But if it makes you wanna move - seriously - if it makes you react the same way I felt, then it passes.

Keak da Sneak

The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away

William Butler Yeats

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

John Irving

Every sensation shares the same characteristic: it arises and passes away, arises and passes away. It is this arising and passing that we have to experience through practice, not just accept as truth because Buddha said so, not just accept because intellectually it seems logical enough to us. We must experience sensation’s nature, understand its flux, and learn not to react to it.

S. N. Goenka

The smoke from the fire passes through the building and the soot affixes itself to the walls. The smoke passes through the air and keeps going - liberation.

Frederick Lenz

Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.

Richard Powers

But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.

Edith Wharton

We live in a time when people are afraid of beauty, because beauty passes; you can't hang on to it. And even if you see something or someone beautiful, the next time you hear it, it sounds different. So you can't cling to beauty; beauty passes and when that passes, you realize you pass too, and you will die. And that's why people cry at a beautiful view, a beautiful lecture, a beautiful painting, a new baby.

Pat Steir

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.