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