Clarissa Quotes

“2 to 12 hearts 1 beat2 lips will meet2 birds 1 stone2 never b alone2 wills 1 goal2 haves 1 whole2 be in love2 be as One***©Clarissa O. ClemensThe Poetic Diary of Love and Change - Volume 1”

“Back BurnerPut the stress on the back burnerIt only burns its way backPut your thoughts on the futureand it becomes the past..."excerpt from my poem Back Burner from The Poetic Diary of Love and Change - Volume 1©Clarissa O. Clemens”

“Forgive me for saying so, Your Highness," Clarissa said slowly, "but for one as unaccustomed to good deeds as you, perhaps it would be best if you started with one on a smaller scale. Something like, I don't know, spreading bread crumbs for birds?""Birds?" Valentina stared at Clarissa as if she had sprouted wings and would fly off. "Why on earth would I wish to feed birds?""It was just a thought," Clarissa murmured.”

“for she could never think of anything to say to Clarissa, though she liked her. She had lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in common - she and Clarissa.”

“The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling - that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled.”

“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”

“What a man sows that shall he and his relations reap.”

“Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”

“The drive toward Life is protective, thoughtful, vulnerable, and invested in immaculate love. It is this last that marks the difference between a wise heart muddy with real life experiences in the trenches and a dry heart that functions on rote concepts alone.”