Quotes from Once

Anna Carey ·  354 pages

Rating: (17.2K votes)


“You do anything for the person you love,” she said finally. "And then when you don’t think you can give any more of yourself, you do. You keep going. Because it would kill you not to.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“I've fallen in love with you," he whispered to kiss the top of my hand.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“I loved every part of him. The smell of his skin, the scar on his cheek, the feel of his fingers pressing into my back. The way he could tell what I was thinking just by looking at me.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“We stood side by side, and for that minute, in the stillness of that room, he was not the King. I was not not the Princess, taken against her will to the City. We were two people trying to forget.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“There are millions of stars, each one shining and burning out at the same time. They die like everything else - you have to appreciate them before they're gone”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once



“Memories can ruin you if you let them.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“The only two people who can understand a relationship are the two people in it,”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“Existen millones de estrellas, pero cada una de ellas brilla y se consume a la vez; mueren como todo..., de modo que hay que apreciarlas antes de que se esfumen.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“Las únicas personas que comprenden una relación son las que la mantienen.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once


“Hacemos todo cuanto podemos por la persona a la que amamos. Y cuando crees que ya no puedes dar nada más de ti misma, vas y haces algo más, porque negarte a ello te mataría.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once



About the author

Popular quotes

“The Dying Man"

in memoriam W.B. Yeats

1. His words

I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.

“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.

“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.

2. What Now?

Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.

Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.

I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.

In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.

3. The Wall

A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.

Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.

The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.

4. The Exulting

Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.

Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.

Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.

All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.

5. They Sing, They Sing

All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.

Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.

I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.

The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems


“scratch the surface and we were all going nuts in a thousand quiet ways.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead


“poster of San Francisco. The image of the Golden Gate Bridge with Alcatraz off in the distance was one of her favorites. If she could visit one place in the world, that’s where she would go.”
― Marie Force, quote from Everyone Loves a Hero


“Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters


“This is the first day of the rest of my life. So why is my hair sticking up like a cockerel?”
― Louise Rennison, quote from Love Is a Many Trousered Thing


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