Respect is and is not about authority

"Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."

Celeste Porter?

Do the thing or dont do it. Either is fine.

"Honestly, there is a lot to be said for tooling about all day, looking up recipes and not making them, not bothering to paint the living room and failing to write a novel. In the middle of the messy, non-event called your mid-afternoon, you might get something—a thought to jot down, a good paragraph, a piece of gossip to text a pal. Boredom is a productive state so long as you don't let it go sour on you. Try not to confuse the urge to get something done with the idea that you are useless. Try not to confuse the urge to contact someone with the thought that you are unloved. Do the thing or don't do it. Either is fine." —Ann Enright

Busy Nothings

1. "Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings" 

   
   

   -Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

   
   

What Remains

"Oh what we could be if we stopped carrying the remains of who we were."

Tyler Knott Gregson

Escape

"In order to understand the world one has to turn away from it on occasion."

Albert Camus

Politically Segregated

“As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups... Like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.” — Bill Bishop, “The Big Sort”

Contour

"Believe in the holy contour of life."

Jack Kerouac

Invisible

"It's the things inside us that feel the most real, but are the most unknown from the outside looking in."

@alimakesthings

Get used to it

"Substantive change is anxiety provoking-- even those changes we are actively pushing for."

Harriet Lerner

Doubt is the handmaiden of truth

"Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the handmaiden of truth. Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery. A belief which may not be questioned binds us to error, for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief. Doubt is the touchstone of truth; it is an acid which eats away the false. Let no [person] fear for the truth, that doubt may consume it; for doubt is a testing of belief. The truth stands boldly and unafraid; it is not shaken by the testing; for truth, if it be truth, arises from each testing stronger, more secure. [They] that would silence doubt [are] filled with fear; the house of [their] spirit is built on shifting sands. But [they] that fear no doubt, and know its use, [are] founded on a rock. [They] shall walk in the light of growing knowledge; the work of [their] hands shall endure. Therefore let us not fear doubt, but let us rejoice in its help: it is to the wise as a staff to the blind; rout is the handmaiden of truth."

Robert T. Weston

Faith is Magnetism

"Faith is the magnetism of divine power interfacing with our desire to believe God and believe that He will help us."

Megan Goates, To Our Survival

A book must be

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

-Kafka

The Broom and the Mess

"Sometimes, I'm the mess. Sometimes, I'm the broom. On the hardest days, I have to be both."

Rudy Francisco

Small Concessions

"When your life is built on a thousand and one small concessions you have made because things didn’t go as planned, then life itself is tethered to what happened before. I couldn’t leave the past behind because I was living some flimsy, upside-down version of it."

Meg Fee

Sea Glass

Now I long for simplicity. It’s all I want.

I do not think this makes me old. I think it makes me pummeled, like sea glass.

Sea glass is pretty.

-Megan Goates, To Our Survival

Hungry Heart

"If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart."

Margaret Atwood

Of Monsters

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."

-Nietzsche

Growing Up Costs the Earth

"Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor credit cards, they find parking spaces. They marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the Earth, the Earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It's serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. That's what I write. What it really is like. I'm just telling a very simple story."

-Maya Angelou

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

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