Parker Palmer Quotes

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

We all know about love, faith, sadness, despair, hope, hopelessness, longing, desire... those are things we all have inside of us, and that's what my songs are about... what it means to be a human being.

Where there is love, there is bound to be heartache.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.

Love is unknown. To open the heart in trust is unknown. They say love hurts. It doesn't have to.

September 11 reinforced for me that whatever I'm writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And for me it's stories about people in pain in New York.

I always say you have to be willing to get your heart broken.

The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

I bleed like nobody else.

I've had my heart broken, and it's not fun. But I'd rather have my heart broken than break someone else's heart.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

As humans, we've all experienced some level of pain. Acting is just a matter of accessing and magnifying these emotions.

Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.

Vulnerability is important in life, I feel. That's what allows you to experience intense emotions, whether it's joy or pain or sadness.

There is hurt that cannot be fixed by band aids or poetrybecause no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.

So what Ghost Stories means to me is like you've got to open yourself up to love and if you really do, of course it will be painful at times, but it will be great at some point.

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, almost black, filled with pain. She'd let someone do that to her. She'd known all along she felt things too deeply. She became attached. She didn't want a lover who could walk away from her, because she could never do that - love someone completely and survive intact if her left her.

I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they'll borrow your heart and they'll forget to return it to you.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

The Detective was different. Not that he wasn't a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didn't like to turn away from another's pain, the kind who couldn't put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.