Pastan's Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Elegance is a glowing inner peace. Grace is an ability to give as well as to receive and be thankful. Mystery is a hidden laugh always ready to surface! Glamour only radiates if there is a sublime courage & bravery within: glamour is like the moon; it only shines because the sun is there.

C. JoyBell C.

#5. Reason gives expression to the laws of inevitability. Consciousness gives expression to the essence of freedom.

Leo Tolstoy

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

Linda Pastan

#7. What we want is never simple.

Linda Pastan

#8. 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

#9. Megan could have kissed him. If there weren't a million obstacles, both physical and psychological, in her way, of course.

Kate Brian

#10. A man has made great progress in cunning when he does not seem too clever to others.

Jean De La Bruyere

#11. Spring is the shortest season.

Linda Pastan

#12. [ ... ]One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they're simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren't they?

Zoe Heller

#13. Listening is not understanding the words of the question asked, listening is understanding why the question was asked in the first place.

Simon Sinek

#14. Ben made me laugh. I was attracted to his attraction for me: the way he smiled for instance, whenever he saw me, that goofy kind of grin that hijacks the face of the helplessly smitten.

Cheryl Drake Harris

#15. Nature is another name for the miracles that are so commonplace in our lives that we take for granted and have grown used to seeing them.

Shalom Arush

#16. Some kids would be much better off without the added confusion of an adult point of view. It destroys the purity of their world.

A.J. Albany

#17. [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

#18. About 10,000 people a day go on first dates from Match ... We're trying to celebrate that, bring those success stories to the forefront and make it even easier in our product to meet up at Starbucks.

Sam Yagan

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

Linda Pastan

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. Grief is a circular staircase.

Linda Pastan

#23. We cannot escape that Hollywood is in the middle of a wave of technological change. The current angst over all the implications of new entertainment technology is nothing new.

Michael Eisner

#24. Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.

Markus Zusak

#25. Death could be waiting for him, but he wasn't afraid. Whether it be sooner or later, he welcomed the inevitability with open arms.

Craig R. Key

#26. 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

#27. The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.

Michael E. DeBakey

#28. I want to play a villain - I can't wait to play a villain.

Bernie Mac

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

Linda Pastan

#30. 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