Proof

“I desperately needed to write this book. Not because I wanted to prove anything. I never sat down to write thinking what am I going to write, what am I proving today. Never. It’s just not how I want to write, it’s the story I need to tell.” 

-JK Rowling  found here

Musee des Beaux Arts

Read this too.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Jung

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” - Jung

All

Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final. — Rainer Maria Rilke 

Poetic Memory

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful." — Milan Kundera,The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Unspoken

we sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

— Fydor Dostoevsky

If

If by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!
—Rudyard Kipling

An Imperial Affliction

“There’s a Certain Slant of Light” -Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons--

That opresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes--

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--

We can find no scar,

But internal difference,

Where the meanings are--

None may teach it--Any--

'Tis the Seal Despair--

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air--

When it comes, the Landscape listens--

Shadows--hold their breath--

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death--

Seen

"Vulnerability is the only authentic state. Being vulnerable means being open, for wounding, but also for pleasure. Being open to the wounds of life means also being open to the bounty and beauty. Don’t mask or deny your vulnerability: it is your greatest asset. Be vulnerable: quake and shake in your boots with it. The new goodness that is coming to you, in the form of people, situations, and things can only come to you when you are vulnerable and open." — Stephen Russell

Forgotten

"Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer
say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the
first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first
images, the echo of words we think we have left behind,
accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our
memory to which, sooner or later - no matter how many books
we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or
forget - we will return. For me those enchanted pages will
always be the ones I found among the passageways of the
Cemetery of Forgotten Books." -The Shadow of the Wind

So Pretty

"You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female'." -Diana Vreeland

Yorick

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Pull Restless

I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. — Anaïs Nin

Romantic

"To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite." — Novalis

Simple

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Burns

Read

• Luke, aged 13: Why do you think it's so important that young people read?
• Philip Pullman: For the same reason that I think it's important that they breathe, eat, drink, sleep, run about, fool around, and have people who love and look after them. It's part of what makes us fully human. Some people manage to get through life without reading; but I know that if I'd had to do that, an enormous part of my mind, or my soul if you like, would be missing. No one should be without the chance to let their soul grow.

Write

"You can teach almost anyone determined to learn them the basics required to write sentences and paragraphs that say what you want them to say clearly and concisely.
It’s far more difficult to get people to think like a writer, to give up conventional habits of mind and emotion. You must be able to step inside your character’s skin and at the same time to remain outside the dicey circumstances you have maneuvered her into.
I can’t remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: ‘No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep."
 — Anne Bernays

Again

"If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It is lethal." — Paulo Coelho

Gold

"But in order to be a truly positive person in all circumstances, one has to learn how to distinguish real gold from tinsel. It is hard, because tinsel sometimes glitters so dazzlingly. I confess, my child, that often in my life I was dazzled by glitter. And sometimes it even shone so falsely, that one dropped pure gold from one's hand and reached for, or ran after, false gold." - Milada Horáková Found here

Love Real

“He loved the woman and he wanted her to be alive for hersake. A theme favored by Saint Augustine was that to love anything (as God loved us in his view) is to want it to be.

I have always thought this to be one of the most profound of metaphysical insights because it connects objective reality and objective worth: to love something, anything, is to want it to be real.”

Robert Kane, from Through the Moral Maze

Here

The Boy

Good

"And now that you don't have to perfect, you can be good." - John Steinbeck

Now Now

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

— Sylvia Plath

My Favorite

William Shakespeare - Hamlet, act V, scene II

Heart Responds

"My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh