Full

"And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone." -W.B. Yeats

Change

"You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now."

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  Anais Nin  

Scarlet

"She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom." - The Scarlet Letter

Cold

From this essay

Toutes les passions ne sout autre chose que les divers degres de la chaleur et de la froideur du sang.
[All passions are nothing else than different degrees of heat and cold of the blood.]
~La Rochefoucauld, Premier Supplement(VIII)

I was in the drug store the other day trying to get a cold medication . . . Not easy. There’s an entire wall of products you need. You stand there going, Well, this one is quick acting but this is long lasting . . . Which is more important, the present or the future?
~Jerry Seinfeld

Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
~Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you.
~Leonardo DaVinci

Cold feet are often symptomatic of a legitimate intuition that you may be heading for the wrong place at the wrong time.
~Suzanne Fields

If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold.
~Carl Gustav Jung, Psyche and Symbol

Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.
~William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.~Emily Dickinson

Water

“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”

- Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Gold Stars

Girls always wait for the world to give them things. To see what sweet, smart, obedient girls they are, then paste a star on their foreheads. It doesn’t work that way. The things you really want in life, you have to take. — The Flamenco Academy by Sarah Bird

Words are Things

"Do you want to know why I’m religious? It’s because of moments like this that I experienced before I was religious. Long before I learned that the Hebrew word for “word” is the same as the word for “thing”. Long before I learned about keilim (vessels) and the ohr (light) they contain.

Maya Angelou spoke this truth and it resonated with me. Resonated with me because it’s something we all know is true even if we don’t acknowledge it. We try to pretend our words aren’t powerful, they don’t have something inherently strong in them that make them just as strong as a sledgehammer or food or poison or medicine, depending on how we use them. We don’t want to admit it, because it’s scary. Scary to think that every word we say is a thing. A deed.

But the truth is, when we accept this reality, when we go deep within ourselves and admit the power of words, when we’re careful with the words we use and deliberate with the way we present them, we have even more power than we had before. A tool is only truly powerful if we’re aware that we wield it." -Elad Nahorai

Wait

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering. 

— Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Ugly

"Ugly is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion. A matter of taste, a whim, an eye, a beholder, an opinion, a spin, light crossing the frame, paint, projection. The moment. Context."

Margaret Cho

Real

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”

- LLoyd Alexander

Summer

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Notes

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it."
-Robert Creeley 

Exactly

"It was such a relief to be with someone who would never audit my heart for heresy."
-Joanna Brooks, Book of Mormon Girl

Ha

I still love the people I’ve loved, even if I cross the street to avoid them.
 — Uma Thurman

Unpublished

"My dear fellow, we all have chapters of our book we would like to be unpublished."
-Lord Grantham , Downton Abbey

Insert Name of Choice

Emma isn’t a person, Emma is a place that you get stuck in. Emma’s a pain that you can’t erase. — Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) on For Emma, Forever Ago 

Perspective

"If you can not bear the difficulties and challenges of single life, you will never be able to bear the challenges and difficulties of married life... those words were a call to action to me to make my life wonderful amid any situation or difficulty I faced... Life is a challenge, but it will always be a challenge single or married."

-Kristen Oaks

Disconnect a Little

"Question number one: does the use of various technologies and media invite or impede the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost in your life.

Question number two: does the time you spend using various technologies and media enlarge or restrict your capacity to live, to love, and to serve in meaningful ways."

Eldner Bednar, Things As They Really Are

Break

You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens. — Rumi

Palace

You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace. — Frank McCourt, from “Angela’s Ashes” a

Remember

‎"To be lost is only a failure of memory." -- Margaret Atwood