Trees

“I realize there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they’re experts at letting things go.”

Jeffrey McDaniel 

Narrative

“I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything’s easy. I believe that loss and emptiness and confusion often give way to new fullness and wisdom.”

- Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet

Poisonwood

"By Anatole I was shattered and assembled, by way of Anatole I am delivered not out of my life but through it."

"Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow." - Orleanna

-Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver

Miss Emily

       Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Verbs

"We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing--an actor, a writer--I am a person who does things--I write, I act--and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun."

Stephen Fry

Uncertainty

​"There is no such thing as fear and uncertainty without opportunity on the other side."  ~ Jonathan Fields. 

Poem

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

- Robert Frost

Give Away

“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”

- C. S. Lewis

Waste not

I’m not gonna sit around and waste my precious divine energy trying to explain and be ashamed of things you think are wrong with me.

— Esperanza Spalding 

Footsteps

“There is divine beauty in learning… To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.”

- Elie Wiesel

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Too many exclamation points dizzies the eye and weakens the words." -Anonymous

"Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Patrica Lee Gauch

"You're the director of the symphony of your book. Whatever shape or size. It helps to be a little crazy."

"A great book needs the wildness."

"There is no greater wisdom about living than a good book."

"Search for a truly original idea and then let go."

"Stay with a sentence until it gives up the rhythms you need."

"The other half of crazy is authentic."

"There is no room for competence alone."

"Being crazy may give you the permission to be original." 

Beauty

“There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”

- G.K. Chesterton

Tangled

"We were tangled in such knots of resentment we hardly understood them."

"I envied them with an intensity near to love, and near to rage."

-Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Emily Dickinson

Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn
Indicative that suns go down;
The notice to the startled grass
That darkness is about to pass.



*This poem is a definition poem; Dickinson wrote a number of poems defining words.  A presentiment is a foreboding, a feeling that something is about to happen, usually something unpleasant or evil.

Worlds

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

— Anne Lamott

Souls

Your soul doesn’t care what you do for a living - and when your life is over, neither will you. Your soul cares only about what you are being while you are doing whatever you are doing.

— Neale Donald Walsch 

To Our

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

- E. E. Cummings

Mysterious

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." -- Albert Einstein