advice on quote selection, placement
This is my first post, but I absolutely love this community! I am thinking about getting another tattoo for the first time in eight years and am trying to work out what I want/what would work. Ideally, I'd like it on the ribs, but I'm highly afraid after reading about how much it hurts. My first tattoo didn't hurt at all, but it's on my backside, right below the underwear/bikini line, so it's mostly fat anyway. :)
(1) Love is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
the exponent of breath.
-Emily Dickinson
I first read this poem when back when after my mother bought me a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I've always remembered it, and I love it because my younger self understood it as a romantic statement about love's timelessness, but now I read it as a reminder that we're all constituted of love, that it's part of our very existence. I'm thinking of just getting the last line (I don't want the tattoo to be very big), but I'm not sure it works alone. :/
(2) I love this Yeats quote: "We make out of quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of our quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
I am really drawn to the idea of just using "Poetry," as a reference. I like the idea of declaring that I am always in conflict, always creating.
(3) I also love this quote by Thoreau: "Though I am old enough to have discovered that the dreams of youth are not to be realized in this state of existence yet I think it would be the next greatest happiness always to be allowed to look under the eyelids of time, and contemplate the perfect steadily with the clear understanding that I do not attain to it."
I adore this quote as a reminder that I am not perfect, and that that is itself a joy, but I don't know if the snippet captures the meaning well enough.
Any thoughts?
(1) Love is anterior to life,
Posterior to death,
Initial of creation, and
the exponent of breath.
-Emily Dickinson
I first read this poem when back when after my mother bought me a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I've always remembered it, and I love it because my younger self understood it as a romantic statement about love's timelessness, but now I read it as a reminder that we're all constituted of love, that it's part of our very existence. I'm thinking of just getting the last line (I don't want the tattoo to be very big), but I'm not sure it works alone. :/
(2) I love this Yeats quote: "We make out of quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of our quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
I am really drawn to the idea of just using "Poetry," as a reference. I like the idea of declaring that I am always in conflict, always creating.
(3) I also love this quote by Thoreau: "Though I am old enough to have discovered that the dreams of youth are not to be realized in this state of existence yet I think it would be the next greatest happiness always to be allowed to look under the eyelids of time, and contemplate the perfect steadily with the clear understanding that I do not attain to it."
I adore this quote as a reminder that I am not perfect, and that that is itself a joy, but I don't know if the snippet captures the meaning well enough.
Any thoughts?