2012

This New Year's Eve I am going to lie under the stars with the people I love. I am going to think, and feel, and be. This year I will be brave. I will love and be loved. I will drink wine and climb mountains. I will be more than content, I will be free.

from A well traveled woman 




1.sow 2. nourish 3. appreciate  4. be brave

Wind

“If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.”

- Toni Morrison

Understand

“A person hears only what they understand.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ah yes

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

- C.S. Lewis

Impostor

Our innate need for connection makes the consequences of disconnection that much more real and dangerous. Sometimes we only think we're connected. Technology, for instance, has become a kind of impostor for connection, making us believe we're connected when we're really not--at least not in the ways we need to be. In our technology crazed world, we've confused being communicative with feeling connected. Just because we're plugged in, doesn't mean we feel seen and heard. 

~ Brené Brown

Paris

“Paris is always a good idea.” ― Audrey Hepburn

Exactly

“Sometimes, she reflected, she dressed for courage, sometimes for success, and sometimes for the consolation of knowing that whatever else went wrong, at least she liked her clothes.” ― Emma Bull

Cups

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” ― Ray Bradbury

Everything

“your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.” ― chuck palahniuk

Bookstore

“What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.” ― Neil Gaiman

Light

"Light creates ambiance and feel of a place, as well as the expression of a structure."
-Le Corbusier

Pace

“We women have a lot to learn about simplifying our lives. We have to decide what is important and then move along at a pace that is comfortable for us. We have to develop the maturity to stop trying to prove something. We have to learn to be content with what we are.” Marjorie Hinckley

Voice

"...I was searching for something outside myself-- some sound that did not belong to me, that was not a part of me and was never to be created by me. And all the time I could have spent investigating my own instrument was instead trying to imitate [the] 'perfect voice'... Remember your true voice can only be arrive at with a relaxed concentration and careful attention to individuality."

-Carolyn Sloan
"Finding Your Voice", page 46

Judgment

Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship. 

~ Brené Brown

Eyes

"I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile, because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you, but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony."

Roald Dahl, Danny, the Champion of the World

Riches

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.”

- Oscar Wilde  

Pain

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

- William Faulkner

Soul

“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”

- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Small and Simple

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief 
duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."  
— Helen Keller 

Thanksgiving

"We can spend our entire lives in scarcity . . . just waiting for for the other shoe to drop and wondering when it will all fall apart. Or, we can lean into the uncertainty and be thankful for what we have in that precious moment. When I'm standing at the crossroads of fear and gratitude, I've learned that I must choose vulnerability and practice gratitude if want to know joy. I'm not sure that it will ever be easy for me, but I have learned to trust this practice. For that, I give thanks!" -Brene Brown 

Rare

“Appreciate how rare and full of potential your situation is in this world, then take joy in it, and use it to your best advantage.”

- Dalai Lama

Joy

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.””

- Rumi

Yes

“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.”

- Marlene Dietrich

Roots

"Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots."

John Green (Paper Towns)

Knowing

"I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t."

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

Truth

Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Perspective

“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Kids

"I believe that a good children's book should appeal to all people who have not completely lost their original joy and wonder in life. The fact is that I don't make books for children at all. I make them for that part of us, of myself and of my friends, which has never changed - which is still a child." - Leo Lionni

Will

“A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.”

- William Shakespeare

Everywhere

I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone. -Charles de Lint

Try Try Try

Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not. ~Virgil Garnett Thomson

Same Different

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged
to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. - Nelson Mandela

22

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

- E. B. White

Move

“Nothing happens until something moves.” -Albert Einstein

Was

“It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.”

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Times

“Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing as your side. For these, my dear boy(s), are the answers to what is most important in this world. This is why we are here.”

-
The Three Questions - bases on a story by Leo Tolstoy

History

"I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of
people and then me, on the outside. Because how do
you meet a new person? I was stunned by this for many
years. And then I realized, you just say, 'Hi.'
They may ignore you. Or you may marry
them. And that possibility is worth that one word."

Augusten Burroughs

Simplify

"As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be 
simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be 
poverty, nor weakness weakness." -Henry David Thoreau

Grand

"Picture that the Grand Canyon is your life--your past, present and future. Start picturing the various parts of your life within the canyon: Over there is the day you were born, your third-grade choir performance, your job as a babysitter. Picture your present: Over there is your apartment, your friends, your mom, the book you're reading right now. Picture your future: Over there is your next vacation, the love of your life, the Top Chef finale.

Now, ...picture the enormous Grand Canyon and drop your worry into it. Whatever you're worrying about--your cranky boss, your dating life, a salty comment from a friend--will be barely visible. "See how tiny it looks?" she says. Suddenly your problem will seem much, much smaller in comparison to the grand course of your huge, rich, long life."
-from here

Be

“If you would create something, you must be something.”  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

Look

"We looked at each other for the last time; nothing we could say was as eloquent as nothing."
-David Mitchell Cloud Atlas

Media Res

"We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories."

-Mona Simpson

Ministering

"When messengers are sent to minister to the inhabitants of this earth, they are not strangers, but from the ranks of our kindred and friends. . . . In like manner, our fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters and friends who have passed away from this earth, having been faithful, and worthy to enjoy these rights and privileges, may have a mission given to them to visit their relatives and friends upon the earth again, bringing from the divine Presence messages of love, of warning, or reproof and instruction, to those who they had learned to love in the flesh."
-Joseph F. Smith

Race

“Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.”

- Hunter S. Thompson

Journey

“It is better to travel well than to arrive.”

- Buddha

Unlikely Pair

"If we want to make the imagination feel at home, generosity 
shows us the way. How else can imagination thrive but in a 
place where welcoming comes first and where judgment feels 
no need to speak and finally feels no need to be?" --Sarah Wider

Btw

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath

Diary

"My bread bakes well.  All is rather rapt, simple, quick, effective–except for my blundering on at The Waves.   I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; till my writing book is like a lunatic's dream.  Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading;  and pencil them into some sense.  Still I am not satisfied.  I think there is something lacking.  I sacrifice nothing to seemliness.  I press to my center." 
-Virginia Woolf A Writer's Diary

Boys Men

“As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practised manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.”
-Willa Cather, My Antonia

A Litany for Survival

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
- Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn


Click here

step

“Little by little, one travels far.”

- J. R. R. Tolkien

Surrender

You can't get what you want in life. God can dream a bigger dream for me, for you than you can ever do for yourself. When you have worked as hard and done as much and strived and tried and given and plead and bargained and hoped.......Surrender.... When you have done all that you can do, and there is nothing left for you to do. Give it up. Give it up to that thing that is greater than yourself and let it then become a part of the flow. -Oprah Winfrey

Dear Void

Never

‎"Never assume that you can make it alone. You need the help of the Lord. Never hesitate to get on your knees in some private place and speak with Him. What a marvelous and wonderful thing is prayer. Think of it. We can actually speak with our Father in Heaven. He will hear and respond, but we need to listen to that response. Nothing is too serious and nothing too unimportant to share with Him." President Hinckley

Drawn

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”

- Rumi 

Intuition

"Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there."
-Paulo Coelho The Alchemist 

Innovation

"When failure is not an option neither is innovation." -Brene Brown

Steve Jobs

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have." -Steve Jobs (from Wired article 1996)

October

Dress up

“It’s the only time I feel like me, she said, & everyone else just thinks it’s dress up.”

- Brian Andreas

Stones

Stones in the road? I save every single one, and one day I’ll build a castle.

— Fernando Pessoa

*

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

— Elie Wiesel

Heal

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

— Leo Tolstoy

Heart

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. -Martin Luther King Jr.

Rain

"The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

Steve

‎"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." -Steve Jobs

Change

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” ~Apple Computer Inc.

Body

"Take note: You have a body, but you are not your body.
You have a mind, but you are not your mind. You have emotions, 
but you are not your emotions. You are the being behind it all, 
able to choose what you want, able to direct it all."
--Joe Vitale, Life's Missing Instruction Manual, 2006.

Weight

"sometimes i can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives i'm not living" jonathan safran foer 

Now

"When we let go of yearning for the future, preoccupation with 
the past, and strategies to protect the present, there is 
nowhere left to go but where we are. To connect with the 
present moment is to begin to appreciate the beauty of true 
simplicity." 
--Jack Kornfield

Scars

"People have scars. In all sorts of unexpected places. Like secret road maps of their personal histories. Diagrams of all their old wounds. Most of our wounds heal, leaving nothing behind but a scar. But some of them don’t. Some wounds we carry with us everywhere and though the cut’s long gone, the pain still lingers."-Meredith Grey

Shape

"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher how to write."
-Annie Proulx

Up

"sadness is known territory. it is a settling back on one's heel. it is a falling inward that comes naturally and takes little to no work. that's not entirely true, it takes a great deal of work, but the work is easy and deceptively alluring.

happiness, well, happiness demands that i be bold. demands that i say yes (most especially when i don't want to). it demands that i value myself enough to feel worthy of happiness."
-Meg Fee

Jane

“Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly.”

- Jane Eyre

Sonnet 29

SONNET 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

-Shakespeare

Trees

"What finally helped me was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally, anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in winter."
-Anne Lamott book, Bird by Bird

Fall

“You expected to be sad in the fall.  Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light.  But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Change

"Unless you are prepared to give up something valuable you will never be able to truly change at all, because you'll be forever in the control of things you can't give up." ~ Andy Law

Clothes

“The reason I make clothes is because it’s linked to art that inspires me, it’s linked to landscapes, it’s linked to maybe a story I’ve read. I think there’s an interconnection because design doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from a world that exists. What you do, is you’re tapping into that, kind of re-exploring it in a sense.”

- Kate Mulleavy 

Ride

“life is like a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving.” - Albert Einstein

Space

“I think Nabokov once said that genius is finding the invisible link between things. And that’s how I choose to see life. Everything’s connected, and everything has meaning if you look for it.”

- Michelle Williams in the October Issue of Vogue 

Sight

"You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. 
Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its 
own. It's just a matter of paying attention to this miracle." 

-Paulo Cohelo

Teach

“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”

- E.E. Cummings

Water

“I want to be like water.
I want to slip through fingers,
but hold up a ship.”

- Michelle Williams

Sunlight

“She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. It’s easier to feel the sunlight without them, she said.”

- Brian Andreas 

Defect

"If you obsess about some defect, you make it obvious to everyone, and suddenly everyone is staring at just that defect. It's always like that. The more you hide something, the more it shows. But when you accept your defect, suddenly no one on earth sees it anymore. In fact, it becomes an asset."

Audrey Tautou

Print

"Print will never die. There's no substitute for the feel of an actual book. I adore physically turning pages and being able to underline passages and not worrying about dropping them in the bath or running out of power.  I also find print books objects of beauty." -JK Rowling

Simple

"Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify, simplify! … Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose."

Henry David Thoreau

Zakka

zakka (from the japanese 'zak-ka' or 'many things'): "the art of seeing the savvy in the ordinary and mundane". 

Music

"For me, music is always the language that permits one to converse with the Beyond."

..Robert Schumann

Encouragement over Criticism

"Sir Walter Scott was a trouble to all his teachers and so was Lord Byron. Thomas Edison, as everyone knows, was considered a dullard in school. Pestalozzi, who later became Italy's foremost educator, was regarded as wild and foolish by his school authorities.


Oliver Goldsmith was considered almost an imbecile. The Duke of Wellington failed in many of his classes. Among famous writers, Burns, Balzac, Boccaccio, and Dumas made poor academic records. Flaubert, who went on to become France's most impeccable writer, found it extremely difficult to learn to read. Thomas Aquinas, who had the finest scholastic mind of all Catholic thinkers, was actually dubbed "the dumb ox" at school. Linnaeus and Volta did badly in their studies. Newton was last in his class. Sheridan, the English playwright, wasn't able to stay in one school more than a year."


-Sydney Harris taken from here

Love

“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Grass

"The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. 
Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where 
it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you 
and tend the grass wherever you may be."
--Robert Fulgham

Eventually

“The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at … something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible.”

- One Day, David Nicholls

It

i, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

anais nin

Faith

"When you do what you love the universe conspires on your behalf and it becomes effortless. When you're on the wrong path life chases you out of it."
-Jillian Michaels/Paul Coehlo

Always

"among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and sickened by human behavior. you're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. you'll learn from them--if you want to. just as someday, if you have something of offer, someone will learn something from you. it's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. and it isn't education. it's history. it's poetry."

the catcher in the rye
j. d. salinger

Both

you cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. 

jonathan safran foer, extremely loud and incredibly close

Become

Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real, you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real, you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

-The Velveteen Rabbit

Far

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out 
how far one can go."-T.S. Eliot

Times

“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”

- Albert Camus

Happy

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.

With sadness there is something to rub against, 

a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,

you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known. 

So Much Happiness | Naomi Shihab Nye

Paradox

Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson

August

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. -Sylvia Plath

Hap Hap

“The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.”

- William Phelps

Tonight

i don't ask you to love me always like this, 
but i ask you to remember. 
somewhere inside me 
there'll always be the person 
i am tonight.

f. scott fitzgerald

Help

"In the end, I received 60 rejections forThe Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60? Three weeks later, Susan sold The Help to Amy Einhorn Books.

The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here]—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won’t take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead.

And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember—just lie."

-Kathryn Stockett via Louise Plummer

Chieko Okazaki

“I do think we should struggle for understanding just as hard as we can. It’s not showing a lack of faith to say, ‘I don’t understand this. Tell me how. Explain why.’ But at the same time, we also need to remind ourselves — sometimes right out loud — that, as the Lord explained to Isaiah: ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways . . . For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:9-9). We need to accept and be patient with our lack of understanding. It’s a superb and glowing faith to say, ‘I don’t understand this and I don’t like it very much, but I accept it. Show me how to live with it, how to deal with it.’ The limitations of mortality are so real and so personal that I’m sure one of the things we’re going to do in the next life is laugh and laugh.”
– “Behold Thy Handmaiden: The Answer of Faith,” chapter 13, Disciples

“Only you know your circumstances, your energy level, the needs of your children, and the emotional demands of your other obligations. Be wise during intensive seasons of your life. Cherish your agency, and don’t give it away casually. Don’t compare yourself to others — nearly always this will make you despondent. Don’t accept somebody else’s interpretation of how you should be spending your time. Make the best decision you can and then evaluate it to see how it works. Practice saying, ‘I feel good about my decision to . . .’ and then fill in the blank with whatever you decided. If you find yourself saying, ‘I should feel good about this decision, but . . .’ then perhaps you need to reevaluate that decision.”
– Lighten Up! , “Seeking the Light of Christ,” Chapter 14

Flight

"Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken 
winged bird that cannot fly."
-Langston Hughes 

Wow

"I've been addicted to Jayne for a long time. I need to be near her. I am dependent on the way she makes me feel. Getting married was the surest way of being closer to her than to any other human. And as an addict, I sometimes feel like I was robbed of the choice to be with her. It was presented to me as a necessity to my happiness and I embraced it as such. And happiness feels like such a hollow word next to what it's like with her." 

-Jed Wells found here

Why it's hard to write about people you love

"Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate." —Anne Carson, Nox(comparing Latin translation to trying to write her brother down).

Choose

"It is our choices, Harry, that shows us who we truly are, far more than our abilities."
-Albus  Dumbledore

Safe

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve 
their reputations ... can never affect a reform."
-Susan B. Anthony

Truth

“The truth is that there are a lot of people like you, us, with strange hobbies or talents or gifts and we try to hide it because we’re afraid that it makes us seem weird or it will turn people off, but that’s a mistake. What makes me unique has brought every person I love into my life.”

- Ned, Pushing Daisies

Mrs. Adam by Kathleen Norris

Mrs. Adam
by Kathleen Norris

I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve,
alias Mrs. Adam. You know, there is no account
of her death in the Bible, and why am I not Eve?
Emily Dickinson in a letter,
12 January, 1846


Wake up,
you’ll need your wits about you.
This is not a dream,
but a woman who loves you, speaking.


She was there
when you cried out;
she brushed the terror away.
She knew
when it was time to sin.
You were wise
to let her handle it,
and leave that place.


We couldn’t speak at first
for the bitter knowledge,
the sweet taste of memory
on our tongues.


Listen, it’s time.
You were chosen too,
to put the world together.

Inside

"If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you.  If you do not bring forth what it within you, it will destroy you."
-Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Emerson

"Do not write about something,"...  "Let the writing be the thing itself.  Every sentence should be its own evidence." -Emerson

Light

Psalm 119:105 "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path."

Pages

“If you take a book with you on a journey,…an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it…yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.”

- Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

Zelda

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses. We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.””

- Zelda Fitzgerald 

Magic

words are, in my not so humble opinion,
our most inexhaustible source of magic. 

harry potter and the deathly hallows

Trees

"I am amazed how trees lose their leaves every winter and bloom forth every spring. The creative power to do that is marvelous; it is beyond my comprehension.... When I encounter a tree, a personality, a spirit comes forth which is wonderful. To see the growth and structure...causes me to bow down in humility. Many times I have come home bowed down with reverence, thankful that I am an artist."


 -
LeConte Stewart

Love

“Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.””

- Ursula K. Le Guin (The Lathe of Heaven)

Sunset

"Bring me the sunset in a cup."
-Emily Dickinson

Love this woman

"I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this
skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to
be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were
independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny
- a thousand things, before ‘thin’. And frankly, I’d rather they
didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman
standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be
Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid
Girls." – J.K. Rowling

Focus

"I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived."   Marjorie Pay Hinckley

Voyage

No journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the 
world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world 
within. 
-Lillian Smith

Wise

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is
healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and
the wisest might err."
-Mahatma Gandhi

Story

i have endless stores of worlds in the form of words. we all do. i may not have the perfect job or the dream man, but i am filled by words. and when all is said and done they satiate me in a way nothing else can.


-Meg Fee

Words

cherish your solitude. take trains by yourself
to places you have never been. sleep out alone
under the stars. learn how to drive a stick shift.
go so far away that you stop being afraid of not
coming back. say no when you don't want to do
something. say yes if your instincts are strong, even 
if everyone around you disagrees. decide whether 
you want to be liked or admired. decide if fitting in
is more important than finding out what you're doing here.
believe in kissing.


even ensler

Death

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”

Start

"Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes 
nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. 
The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who also 
knows why will always be his boss. As to methods there may be 
a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who 
grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The 
man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have 
trouble." 
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bound

"When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free."
-Catherine Ponder

Burried

"Everyone, deep down within, carries a small cemetery of those he has loved."
-Romain Rolland

Dreams

“I think of [dreams] as snapshots floating up from a mysterious vat, offering metaphoric pictures of what’s going on inside. Sometimes the images suggest where my soul wants to lead me and sometimes where it does not, giving me input and guidance about choices I might make.” -Sue Monk Kidd Traveling with Pomegranates

Art

“I have said my say in paints, what I find difficult to say in words.” –LeConte Stewart

Reality

"Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. Don't take yourself so seriously."
-Norman Vincent Peale

Of Matter

"Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least."
-Goethe

Change

"Discontent is the first necessity of progress."
-Thomas A. Edison

Listen

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them- if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
-J.D. Salinger

oh la

there is more to sex appeal than just measurements.

i don't need a bedroom to prove my womanliness.

i can convey just as much sex appeal, picking apples off

a tree or standing in the rain.

audrey hepburn

Deeper

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
-Rumi

Thoughts

"I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet."
-Mahatma Gandhi