Author Highlight: Introspective Quotes By Emily Dickinson

I wonder if any of my SBA fam are readers of the classics? In this case, the American classics!

Today, we remember Author and Poet, Emily Dickinson, and reflect on some of her most renowned quotes. 

About Emily Dickinson:

Born on December 10, 1830 to English and Scottish parents, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson led an interesting and mysterious life. She lived in the Dickinson Homestead, her family's home, for her whole life, and rarely got out. However, Dickinson's seclusion did not diminish her intellectual and emotional growth. Astoundingly and rarely, it seemed to nurture a rich inner world fueled by her fierce reading habits, including literature, science, and religion genres.

During her secluded life, Dickinson penned an impressive collection of over 1,800 poems. However, it wasn't until later that her writings would become world famous. Dickinson tended to share her writings only privately with a select few, including close friends and family. It was after her death in 1886 (she was 55 years old when she passed) that her sister discovered her hundreds of poems and writings and determined to have them published for the world to read.

Her unique style explores themes such as love, nature, death, and the human experience. Dickinson's poems often invite the reader into introspection, causing the reader to face the fragility of life and certain universal truths about life. Today, she is celebrated as one of America's most significant authors and literary figures, a poet who defied "the rules" and left a historic mark on the world of literature. 

Renown Quotes:

1. "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all."
2. "Forever is composed of nows."
3. "To live is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else."
4. "If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain."
5. "Beauty crowds me till I die, beauty, mercy, have on me!"
6. "The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."
7. "We never know how high we are till we are called to rise."
8. "I dwell in possibility."
9. "Luck is not chance, it's toil; fortune's expensive smile is earned."
10. "Where thou art, that is home."
11. "The heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care."
12. "Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door."
13. "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all."
14. "A wounded deer leaps the highest."
15. "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry."
16. "I am out with lanterns, looking for myself."
17. "The brain is wider than the sky."
18. "Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality."
19. "The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind."
20. "I took my power in my hand and went against the world."
21. "If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themself."
22. "You don't have to be  house to be haunted."
23. "That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
24. "We turn older with years but newer everyday."

Here to help,

Brier C.