Quote

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief turning downward through it s black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.

David Whyte

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David Whyte
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: September 21
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Poet
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Marrickville
New South Wales
Australia
Never
Place
Source
Thrown
Glimmering
Cannot
Cold
Round
Downward
Stills
Small
Rounds
Slip
Still
Secret
Breathe
Coins
Find
Clear
Surface
Wished
Wells
Water
Grief
Slips
Well
Black
Darkness
Beneath
Something
Else
Drink
Turning

More quotes by David Whyte

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The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
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To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous to allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self...the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation.
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Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
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The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
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We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.
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I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.
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If I don't have time for the writing, it's because I'm not making that time. It's really just a question of whether you want to or not, whether you feel you deserve to write or not.
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To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
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Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.
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The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.
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Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
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Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.
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In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.
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To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
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Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
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Heartbreak is how we mature... There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.
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Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
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For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.
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I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
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To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
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