Rick Aster Quotes

“You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.”

“She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.”

“Already the ripening barberries are redAnd the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.The man who is not rich now as summer goesWill wait and wait and never be himself.The man who cannot quietly close his eyescertain that there is vision after vision inside,simply waiting for nighttimeto rise all around him in darkness-it's all over for him, he's like an old man.Nothing else will come; no more days will openand everything that does happen will cheat him.Even you, my God. And you are like a stonethat draws him daily deeper into the depths.”

“In your life, right here and now, things like mermaids, fairies, witches and monsters are nothing but fairytales told to your grandchildren and stories you heard from your own grandparents as children. They exist only in your imagination. Did you ever think that there is a chance all this was once real, that it all existed? Perhaps yes, but you would then consider such thoughts irrational, that even if you were to believe it and try telling someone they would think you for mad. In my world those creatures are real – I’m real, and I am here to tell you of a story that happened in eons past in the majestic island of Aster." - Queen of Merfolk Asteria - Ninemia”

“the battered woman--for she wore a skirt--with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love--love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over.”

“At the top, I put the camera's viewfinder to my eye and slowly turned, the way my grandmother had taught me. From every vantage point something remarkable filled the screen- clusters of wild red columbine, fallen boulders forming geometric designs against the wall, crusty green lichen gnawing on rocks, a Baltimore oriole popping from a thicket of brush, and, at my feet, a grasshopper clinging to a stem of purple aster. I could spend a day here and barely scratch the surface. The sun felt warm on my shoulders as I bent down to capture the blossoms of yellow star grass, the feathery purple petals of spotted knapweed, and the lacy wings of two yellow jackets as they alighted on tiny white blossoms of Labrador tea. By the time I finished taking photos of a monarch butterfly resting on milkweed, I realized an hour had passed.”

“The GeraniumWhen I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,She looked so limp and bedraggled,So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,Or a wizened aster in late September,I brought her back in againFor a new routine -Vitamins, water, and whateverSustenance seemed sensibleAt the time: she'd livedSo long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,Her shriveled petals fallingOn the faded carpet, the staleSteak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)The things she endured!-The dumb dames shrieking half the nightOr the two of us, alone, both seedy,Me breathing booze at her,She leaning out of her pot toward the window.Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me-And that was scary-So when that snuffling cretin of a maidThrew her, pot and all, into the trash-can,I said nothing.But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,I was that lonely.”

“Most of us try to do too much because we are secretly afraid we will not be able to do anything at all.”

“You may have to break this heart before you can use it. You may have to take it apart and start all over with me. I know it hurts to change, but I don't want to stay the same. Take me. Break me. Do whatever it takes to make me what you need me to be”

“Wherever people go to find peace - that's what I find in the ocean.”