Quotable quotes: I was researching some quotes I love. Unfortunately, I know them when I hear them but to bring them up to memory sometimes is difficult. Still I thought I would place some I do remember on my blog simply because I love them.

One was given by Robert Kennedy told to a group of African Americans he met on his campaign trail for president in 1968 several months before his own death. He had just found out about the assassination of Martin Luther King and did not know how to break the horrific news to them. He tried to calm the crowd by trying to relay that he knew how they felt since he had a brother who was killed too. He knew that kind of grief. He quoted from one of the many classics he had read trying to understand his brother's death. He quoted from Aeschylus's play Agamemnon and said:

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

The other I love was his quoting from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at the Democratic National Convention, August 27, 1964 in remembering his brother Jack. He said:

"Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun."


I believe those quotes are simply gorgeous. Shakespeare, especially, one can say certainly had a way with words. Ah to be young again when memorizing things comes much more easily. So now I still try but my goodness there is just too much to know and not enough time in which to know it which is why I love Robert Frost's quote from the last stanza of his poem Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.