Pastan Quotes

#1. I have dreamed of our bed as if it were a shore where we would be washed up, not this striped mattress we must cover with sheets. [from "After an Absence"]

Linda Pastan

#2. I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.

Linda Pastan

#3. In preparation for a career in academic medicine, I worked as a medical house officer at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital from 1966 to 1968 and then joined Ira Pastan's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health as a Clinical Associate.

Harold E. Varmus

#4. I am tired of the litany
of months, September October
I am tired of the way the seasons
keep changing, mimicking
the seasons of the flesh
which are real and finite.

Linda Pastan

#5. Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.

Carl Jung

#6. I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror

Augusten Burroughs

#7. Grief is a circular staircase.

Linda Pastan

#8. Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.

Harold E. Varmus

#9. I made a list of things I have
to remember and a list
of things I want to forget,
but I see they are the same list.

Linda Pastan

#10. Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut.

Linda Pastan

#11. Great men are the guideposts and landmarks in the state.

Edmund Burke

#12. [But the constricted light,
the year closing down on itself with all
the vacancies of January ahead, leave me
unreconciled even to beauty.]
When will you be coming back?

Linda Pastan

#13. Must every action - every word and thought - recall Alena? Swimming, currents, beaches, exhibitions, artists, parties. How long until my bodily presence had half the substance her absence did?

Rachel Pastan

#14. Life was not fair, it simply existed. If you accidentally stepped on a poison snake, you got bitten. Intentions were irrelevant.

Terry Goodkind

#15. Spring is the shortest season.

Linda Pastan

#16. If a worker is deprived of hope to acquire some personal property, what other natural stimulus can be offered him that will inspire him to hard work, labor, saving and sobriety today, when so many nations and men have lost everything and all they have left is their capacity for work?

Pope Pius XII

#17. Most people'll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They cant wait to see him.

Cormac McCarthy

#18. To be the other woman
is to be a season
that is always about to end,
when the air is flowered
with jasmine and peach,
and the weather day after day
is flawless,
and the forecast
is hurricane.

Linda Pastan

#19. What we want is never simple.

Linda Pastan

#20. Evil is simply
a grammatical error:
a failure to leap
the precipice
between "he"
and "I.

Linda Pastan

#21. So many miseries have craz'd my voice,
That my woe-wearied tongue is still and mute.

William Shakespeare

#22. Wasn't the leap from the farm or the small town to the college campus enough cultural dislocation? Wasn't college education itself enough of a voyage?

Rachel Pastan