Best 15 quotes of Linda Pastan on MyQuotes

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

Grief is a circular staircase.

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.

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"]

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.

I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.

Just looking at them I grow greedy, as if they were freshly baked loaves waiting on their shelves to be broken open--that one and that--and I make my choice in a mood of exalted luck, browsing among them like a cow in sweetest pasture. For life is continuous as long as they wait to be read--these inked paths opening into the future, page after page, every book its own receding horizon. And I hold them, one in each hand, a curious ballast weighing me here to earth.

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

Spring is the shortest season.

There are poems that are never written, that simply move across the mind like skywriting on a still day: slowly the first word drifts west, the last letters dissolve on the tongue, and what is left is the pure blue of insight, without cloud or comfort.

What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names - now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.

Because the night you asked me, the small scar of the quarter moon had healed - the moon was whole again; because life seemed so short; because life stretched out before me like the halls of a nightmare; because I knew exactly what I wanted; because I knew exactly nothing; because I shed my childhood with my clothes - they both had years of wear in them; because your eyes were darker than my father's; because my father said I could do better; because I wanted badly to say no; because Stanly Kowalski shouted "Stella...;" because you were a door I could slam shut; because endings are written before beginnings; because I knew that after twenty years you'd bring the plants inside for winter and make a jungle we'd sleep in naked; because I had free will; because everything is ordained; I said yes.

What We Want What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don't remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there.

I'm only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I'll be gone forever—- the way the door closes behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I'd need for an eternity of traveling light. I've left my hotel number on your desk, instructions about the dog and heating dinner. But like the weather front they warn is on its way with its switchblades of wind and ice, our lives have minds of their own.

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.