There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.—
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.—
What is the purpose of a giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse….Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.—
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.—
Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
The winds will blow their own freshness into you…
while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.—
To see a world in a grain of sand,—
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
An eternity in an hour.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.—
If ever there is tomorrow when we’re not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we’re apart.. I’ll always be with you.—
What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.—
…the object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity—
Given angel’s wings, where might you fly? In what sweet heaven might you find your love?—
Unwilling to be bound, where might you move, lost between the wonder and the why?
If you were but a flame of pure desire, a light so lovely you could not be seen,
Near mad with yearning, yet somehow serene, and that were all, what more might you require?
Only as high as I reach can I grow,—
Only as far as I seek can I go,
Only as deep as I look can I see,
Only as much as I dream can I be.
I’ve always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you’ve got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn’t supposed to be easy.—
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.—
Don’t question why she needs to be so free,—
She’ll tell you it’s the only way to be.
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.—
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.—
Your heart understands what your head cannot yet conceive; trust your heart.
The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.—
In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.—
The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.—
The Mad Hatter: Have I gone mad?—
Alice: I’m afraid so. You’re completely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.—
Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.— , How To Be Creative: 15, 08-22-04
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than the living size then they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.—
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experiences possible in life. And I am horribly limited.—
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.—
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way that this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.— , Sonnett XVII
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.—
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.—
And don’t spend your time lookin’ around—
For something you want that can’t be found
When you find out you can live without it
And go along not thinkin’ about it
I’ll tell you something true
The bare necessities of life will come to you
The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself. The magnificence of a body that doesn’t get to choose when to go to the bathroom, let alone which bathroom to use. A body that doesn’t get to choose what to wear in the morning, what hairstyle to sport, how they’re going to move or stand, or what time they’re going to bed. The magnificence of bodies that have been coded, not just undesirable and ugly, but un-human. The magnificence of bodies that are understanding gender in far more complex ways than I could explain in an hour. Moving beyond a politic of desirability to loving the ugly. Respecting Ugly for how it has shaped us and been exiled. Seeing its power and magic, seeing the reasons it has been feared. Seeing it for what it is: some of our greatest strength.—
Deep ecology, or biocentrism, is the belief that nature does not exist to serve humans. Rather, humans are a part of nature, one species among many. All species have a right to exist for their own sake, regardless of their usefulness to humans. And biodiversity is a value in itself, essential for the flourishing of both human and non-human life.— , Revolutionary Ecology
I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.—
Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.—
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.—
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.— , The Painted Drum
Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving.— , In That Great River: A Notebook
Isn’t man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife – birds, kangaroos, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice, foxes and dingoes – by the million in order to protect his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billion and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative – and fatal – health conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for …cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a year, sends out cards praying for Peace on Earth.—
What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’ Alright. Well what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow… So, I sort of played a moral hide-and-seek in my mind. I was left with this realization that I could eat an animal directly, or I could pass an animal through a plant and then eat it, but either way there were animals involved in this process. I could not remove animals from the equation. I had to accept on some level that there was a cycle here, and it was very ancient, and ultimately very spiritual. It was really hard for me to accept the ‘death’ part of that equation. Years. It took me years to finally face it. But there wasn’t any way out of it if I was going to grow things.—
I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent was much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma; it was a whiff of salt and mint, just as I approached the water on a dive, that warned me that a more powerful scent would soon enter my nose. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.—
To all the secret writers, late-night painters, would-be singers, lapsed and scared artists of every stripe, dig out your paintbrush, or your flute, or your dancing shoes. Pull out your camera or your computer or your pottery wheel. Today, tonight, after the kids are in bed or when your homework is done, or instead of one more video game or magazine, create something, anything. Pick up a needle and thread, and stitch together something particular and honest and beautiful, because we need it. I need it.— , Cold Tangerines
A human being is a part of the whole called by us “the universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.—
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.—
Why is it unimaginable, unthinkable, or absurd to talk about getting rid of electricity, but it is not unimaginable, unthinkable, and absurd to think about extirpating great apes, great cats, salmon, passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, short-nosed sea snakes, coral reef communities? And why is it just as accepted to allow the extinction of indigenous humans who are also inevitable victims of this way of life (many of whom live with little or no electricity)? This failure of imagination is not only [detached from physical reality], it is profoundly immoral.Imagine for a moment that we weren’t suffering from this lack of imagination. Imagine a public official saying not that he cannot imagine living without electricity, but that he cannot imagine living with it, that what he can’t imagine living without are polar bears, the mother swimming hundreds of miles next to her child, and, when the child tires, hundreds of miles more with the cub on her back. Imagine if this public official, or rather, imagine if we all were to say that we cannot imagine living without rockhopper penguins (as I write this, the largest nesting grounds of endangered rockhoppers is threatened by an oil spill).
Imagine if we were to say we cannot imagine living without the heart-stopping flutters and swoops and dives of bats, and we cannot imagine living without hearing frog song in spring. Imagine if we were to say that we cannot live without the solemn grace of newts, and the cheerful flight of bumblebees (some areas of China are so polluted that all pollinators are dead, which means all flowering plants are effectively dead, which means hundreds of millions of years of evolution have been destroyed). Imagine if it were not this destructive culture—and its textile mills, brick kilns, electric railways, and advanced industrial processes—that we could not imagine living without, but rather the real, physical world? — , Imagine
I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts. The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.— , Reflections on Writing: The Wisdom of the Heart
I cannot believe that the purpose of life is (merely) to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate. I think it is above all to matter, to count, to stand for something. To have it make some difference that you lived at all.—
He did not know why he was hugging the earth, why he could not kiss it enough, why he longed to kiss it all… He kissed it again and again, drenching it with his tears, vowing to love it always, always. ‘Water the earth with your tears,’ a voice rang out in his soul… he felt clearly , almost physically, something real and indestructible, like the vault of the sky over his head, entering his soul. Something, a kind of idea, had taken over his soul forever and ever. He was a weak youth when he fell to the ground and he rose a strong and determined fighter—
‘You know why trees smell the way they do?’ Murphy asked, looking up from her hammering. ‘Sap?’ Logan guessed. ‘Chlorophyll?’ Murphy shook her head. ‘Stars. Trees breath in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That’s why trees smell so beautiful and old.’— , Where I’d Like to Be
There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.—
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.—
This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to figure it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.— , Norwegian Wood
Girl, open the windows, let the air and the music inside your room. Turn off the TV, stretch your body out as far as it goes. The plants you nurtured are all beaming and growing in gratitude. Will you step into the light from the screen so that I can make out your shape? You don’t need to tell me anything because I know what you mean. The rain shall come and corpses become roses. There’s a hidden beauty finding its way out of everything. Just hold your tongue, don’t be so quick to curse them. There’s a hidden beauty finding its way out of everyone.—
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity. — Tao Te Ching
When you plant seeds in the garden, you don’t dig them up every day to see if they have sprouted yet. You simply water them and clear away the weeds; you know that the seeds will grow in time. Similarly, just do your daily practice and cultivate a kind heart. Abandon impatience and instead be content creating the causes for goodness; the results will come when they’re ready.—
When you enter a forest, deep into a forest, and walk under very tall trees, you realize how overpowering nature is. It has a spirituality that draws you into it. It is also a place where you can escape and create your own reality. For an adult, it has the power of bringing your instincts out. You have to be aware of what’s happening around you, your instincts are turned on, and human nature comes out.—
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. —
Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts … good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with.—
I will wade out till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers. i will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air, alive, with closed eyes.—
Do not tolerate, from yourself or others, jokes that make fun of anyone for anything that is harmful or out of their control. Ever. Period. Full stop. Not racist jokes, not sexist jokes, not homophobic or transphobic jokes, not jokes that make fun of people who have physical or mental disabilities or illnesses. Practice this now, and practice it deliberately. You should have a sense of humour, but this is NOT a sense of humour. Don’t do it. Ever. It’s never okay.
What I find very attractive, what I find sexual, are people who are unapologetic for who they are and comfortable with themselves. And I think with those two things sexual energy does come out because you’re not hovering or censoring yourself, you’re just being who you are. And being who you are is a very attractive quality in a person.—
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no whenever you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. And believe in kissing.—
I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.—
The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set.—
There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.—
The common expression is ‘I love you.’ But instead of ‘I love you,’ it would be better to say, ‘I am love — I am the embodiment of pure love.’ Remove the I and you, and you will find that there is only love. It is as if love is imprisoned between the I and you. Remove the I and you, for they are unreal; they are self-imposed walls that don’t exist. The gulf between I and you is the ego. When the ego is removed the distance disappears and the I and you also disappear. They merge to become one — and that is love. You lend the I and you their reality. Withdraw your support and they will disappear. Then you will realise, not that ‘I love you,’ but that ‘I am that all-embracing love.’—
I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.— , The Fault In Our Stars
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.—
“When you are born,” the golem said softly, “your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing that someone will think you are foolish, putting strange things in your mouth. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk, and crusty things, and dirt, and fear, and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you’re half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it’s so grunged up with living. So every once in awhile, you have to scrub it up and get the works going, or else you’ll never be brave again.”— , The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
You once told me that the sky had no colour. That it simply borrowed the hues of our souls, and wore it on its skin for the day. You said the world is draped in a lot of sorrow. At seven years old I pretended to know what that meant. That I understood why hearts break without making a sound, and people leave without saying goodbye, and my body is falling apart but somehow it’s still together. Sixteen years young, and tonight, I’m staring at a blue blue sky that’s all my fault.— http://messagestothemooon.tumblr.com/
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. — , Fahrenheit 451
I ached all over for her; I leaned my head in her beautiful hair. Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it. ‘I love love,’ she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that.— , On The Road
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.—
…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars,…and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.—
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.—
It’s beautiful when you find someone that is in love with your mind. Someone that wants to undress your conscience and make love to your thoughts. Someone that wants to watch you slowly take down all the walls you’ve built up around your mind and let them inside.
If you live consciously, if you try to bring consciousness to every act that you go through, you will be living in a silent, blissful state, in serenity, in joy, in love. Your life will have the flavour of a festival. That is the meaning of heaven: your life will have many flowers in it, much fragrance will be released through you. You will have an aura of delight. Your life will be a song of life-affirmation, it will be a sacred yes to all that existence is. You will be in communion with existence — in communion with stars, with the trees, with the rivers, with the mountains, with people, with animals. This whole life and this whole existence will have a totally different meaning for you. From every nook and corner, rivers of bliss will be flowing towards you. Heaven is just a name for that state of mind. Hell means you are living so unconsciously, so absurdly, in such contradiction, that you go on creating more and more misery for yourself.—
The saddest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there’s nothing to make it last.—
Under anger, there’s hurt. Under hurt, there’s love. You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.—
I know a girl who cries when she practices violin because each note sounds so pure it just cuts into her, and then the melody comes pouring out her eyes. Now, to me, everything else just sounds like a lie.—
Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying ‘yes’ begins things. Saying ‘yes’ is how things grow. Saying ‘yes’ leads to knowledge. ‘Yes’ is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.—
How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.—
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.—
The problem isn’t that we wake up in the morning wanting to contribute to cruelty or violence. The problem is we don’t wake up in the morning wanting to create more compassion, peace and nonviolence. If that were on our to-do list every day, imagine what we could accomplish. Imagine what our world would be like.May our daily choices be a reflection of our deepest values, and may we use our voices to speak for those who need us most, those who have no voice, those who have no choice. It’s up to each one of us to create the world we want to live in; if not you, then who? If not now, then when? —
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.—
All women dream of meeting a partner who will like our bodies as they are. We long for partners who will offer affirmation and unconditional acceptance, particularly if we have never been affirmed or were affirmed only as children in our families of origin. We long for acceptance of our physical beings, to be admired as we are, even as we withhold affirmation from ourselves. This is the worst form of self-sabotage. We can “start where we are” by offering ourselves that gaze of approval we long to see in the eyes of someone else. The more we love our flesh, the more others will delight in its bounty. As we love the female body, we are able to let it be the ground on which we build a deeper relationship to ourselves—a loving relationship uniting mind, body, and spirit.— , Communion
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.— , 1984
In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.— , Warm Bodies
I have to believe that caring for myself is not self indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.—
Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of it’s constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.—
I want to feel my life. I want to stop agreeing to things I don’t really want.— Living Out Loud
Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you.—
To hell, to hell with balance! …Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous – lava, inflammable, unrestrained.—
To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.—
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.— Xenocide
Intelligent girls were often instinctively theatrical, purposely eccentric, mouthing highly suggestive words to confuse people. He had seen a number of such cases when it was impossible to distinguish the real thing from acting.—
I was afraid to be alone, and now I’m scared that’s how I like to be.— , November
Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you’re working. Tell them it’s research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.—
I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, “Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?” or “Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?” But you can’t say that at a cocktail party.— , The Mental Illness Happy Hour
Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.—
Home is such a funny thing you guys. Like how you can leave a piece of yourself in so many different places, people, and ideas. How you can feel at home when you hug a stranger or smell a new city or even/especially in between the letters of the chat window. How you can be at home and still be homesick, how homely can be a bad thing but homelessess can’t be a political statement. Home in the house, home in the woods, home in the tent, home on the road, home in a book or an old bottle of perfume or a plate of lumpia and pancit. Wonder if I’ll ever feel like I found home.—
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.—
You have learnt so much, And read a thousand books. Have you ever read your Self? You have gone to mosque and temple. Have you ever visited your soul?—
Do not settle for less than exactly what you want. Your heart’s desires are there for a reason. Chase them. Pursue them relentlessly. Do not lose sight of your goals. They are your very reason for being.—
I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.—
Suffering cracks open the shell of ego, and then comes a point when it has served its purpose. Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.—
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.—
We’re damn lucky to have our bodies, these strange, multi-functional machines, that let us leave our legacy on the planet. I hope you realise how powerful they are and decide that today you’re going to start treating it with love and kindness. Think of it like a child; if you were to continue to feed it on mental and physical abuse, and starve it of love and nourishment, how would it grow into anything other than an angry, embittered, cold-hearted delinquent? Whereas if you tell that child everyday that it’s beautiful, loved, and can do anything, there’s no limits on what it can grow up to be. It’s pretty simple: Serve your body best so it can serve YOU best.—
When we think of death we imagine that we are spectators.—
You are much deeper, much broader, much brighter than any idea you could have of yourself.—
Embrace aging. It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. if you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.— , Tuesdays with Morrie
Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble, because that reason can be taken from you.—
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.—
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.—
I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.—
I’m concentrating on staying healthy, having peace, being happy, remembering what is important, taking in nature and animals, spending time reading, trying to understand the universe, where science and the spiritual meet.—
A body. The body. My body. Mine. Hear its stops, its starts, its sighs. Feel its yearning to be understood and heard over the hum of billions of other bodies breathing together. In, out. Out, in. Are there any two sets of lungs in the world that inhale at exactly the same time? Feel the rubbing together of knees and elbows and thighs, breath on skin, hair on fingertips. I am constantly amazed by the galaxy that is the body, mini solar systems revolving around the sun, or navel: circulatory, respiratory, skeletal. The heart has its own gravitational pull and the body is just a satellite caught in its orbit. How dare you call yourself ugly when you’re made from stardust? When it’s running in your veins, caught between your teeth like fairy lights and strung up between the ladders of your ribs so that each side of you emits light, constant and luminous? The history of the body tells us that we only carry the things that we think we need most, and the rest is just star-stuff.— , Ode to the Body
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.—
You know, the politicians call it socialism when they give a little money to the poor to keep them alive but when they give huge amounts of money to a big business to keep it alive they call it “subsidies.— , A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement
People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That’s not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you’re given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.—
I realise there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they’re experts at letting things go.—
The doctor sits me on a table and asks me to stick out my tongue.
I do.I ask him if he sees the paintings I carry in the back of my throat.
He laughs as if I’m telling a joke,
I’m not.I’ve got Basquiat, Schiele, Van Gogh, and Da Vinci
so when I laugh, I taste brushstrokes.I ask him if he can stick out his tongue
so I can see what he has trapped inside of him.He hesitates a little then he does and I see a man who
struggles for acceptance and chokes on the word
Love. — , The Parts of Humans Science Can’t Explain
Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.—
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. — , When You Are Old
If culture can belong to someone, it belongs to those who have significant experiences with it.— , Cultural Appropriation
You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.—
And so being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.—
I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.—
If you receive the world with the wide-open soul, you see the truths of happiness increasing and expanding, and the truths of sorrow getting smaller and narrower. And you will realize that if it gets narrower, for you are getting narrower in soul, not life.—
