Rod McKuen Quotes

Strangers are just friends waiting to happen

I've been going a long time now along the way I've learned some things. You have to make the good times yourself take the little times and make them into big times and save the times that are all right for the ones that aren't so good.

It's nice sometimes to open up the heart a little and let some hurt come in. It proves you're still alive.

May your hand be full for always if only with another hand. May your heart be empty only long enough to give you cause to fill it up again with love. May your soul be lost by you only to be found by God.

Cats have it all - admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.

Even when you feel you've reached the end or edge of life, hold on. Life itself will ultimately take care of you.

No map to help us find the tranquil flat lands, clearings calm, fields without mean fences. Rolling down the other side of life our compass is the sureness of ourselves. Time may make us rugged, ragged round the edges, but know and understand that love is still the safest place to land.

People are not born bastards. They have to work at it.

We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We're meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it's a long way from the morning to the evening.

I have never known a cat that couldn't quiet me down just by walking slowly past my chair.

Be gentle with me, new love. Treat me tenderly. I need the gentle touch, the soft voice, the candlelight after nine. There's been so many who didn't understand so give me all the love I see in your timid eyes but give it gently Please.

I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I'm alone more often than I should be, because I try to find security within myself.

If I could do it over, I'd do better.

I chose the shadows; they did not choose me. I stay here securely not just because I feel plain, but because disappearance is by now the easy way. The habit. The worn path that I can trod knowingly and be assured safe passage home.

The gifts that one receives for giving are so immeasurable that it is almost an injustice to accept them.

The journey back is always longer than the forward run.

Do not ask the definition of a friend. He/She is that one without whose company death and dying set in earlier and living is made more pleasurable.

Extending your hand is extending yourself.

There's no misery in not being loved, only in not loving.

If you love somebody, tell them.

Never fear being alone, because you never are.

Unless you call attention to your presence who will know you're there? Even a country has to weave and wave a flag as proof of its existence.

Love is a sweet thing caught a momentand held in a golden eye.

I cannot speculate on what our cluttered mind will save- sleepy Sundays, or a nosebleed after love. I know only the dying heart needs the nourishment of memory to live beyond too many winters.

There is no other way to find ourselves but in each others faces.