It's Never Wasted

“No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God … and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we came here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.”

Orson F. Whitney

Because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying...

" People are always telling you that change is a good thing. But all they're really saying is that something you didn't want to happen at all... has happened. My store is closing this week. I own a store, did I ever tell you that? It's a lovely store, and in a week it will be something really depressing, like a Baby Gap. Soon, it'll just be a memory. In fact, someone, some foolish person, will probably think it's a tribute to this city, the way it keeps changing on you, the way you can never count on it, or something. I know because that's the sort of thing I'm always saying. But the truth is... I'm heartbroken. I feel as if a part of me has died, and my mother has died all over again, and no one can ever make it right."

You've Got Mail, Nora Ephron

Good Night Dear Void

"Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void."

You've Got Mail, Nora Ephron

Tragedies to Stories

“The tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.” - Nora Ephron

Women March

"There is no noise as powerful as the sound of the marching feet of a determined people."

-MLK JR.

We are Water

"She is water--soft enough to offer life. Tough enough to drown it away."

-Rupi Kaur

Stars are Silent

"All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems...But all these stars are silent. You - You alone will have stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night...You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me...You will always be my friend. you will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure...It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number or little bells that knew how to laugh."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Concentrated Hue

"A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful."

-Henry Matisse

Francis of Assisi Prayer

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace,
that where there is hatred, I may bring love;
that where there is wrong,
 I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;
that where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
that where there is error, I may bring truth;
that where there is doubt, I may bring faith;
that where there is despair, I may bring hope;
that where there are shadows, I may bring light;
that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to
comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood;
to love, than to be loved.
For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.
It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.
It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.

Faith Includes

“My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.”

-Richard Rohr

― Richard Rohr

Tangled Path

"You'll never untangle the circumstances that have brought you to this moment."

Leonard Cohen

Blow the rest away...

"Oh, the comfort- the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."

Dinah Maria Craik

Simply Words

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

Jack Kerouac

Woman's Scepter

"Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison."

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792

Orbit of Your Soul

"The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?"

Oscar Wilde

Mercilessly

"Don't bend; don't water it down;
don't try to make it logical;
don't edit your own soul according to the fashion.
Rather, follow your  most intense obsessions mercilessly."

-Franz Kafka

Happiness

"Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour."

-Walt Whitman