Quotes

‘Well, it will be a new experience anyway.’–George Bernard Shaw (1856-1952), the night before he died.
‘Forever after, you will recognize those places–previously invisible, indiscernible–where memory pools accumulate. All the waiting areas of hospitals, hospital rooms, and, in particular, those regions of the hospital reserved for the very ill: Telemetry, Intensive Care. You will not wish to return to these places, where memory pools lie underfoot, as treacherous as acid.’–Joyce Carol Oates (1938), after the death of her husband of 47 years, Raymond.
From her attic study, Kenyon could see Mt. Kearsarge, and she told people, ‘That mountain treats everybody the same.’–Jane Kenyon (1947–1995)
‘Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.’–more Jane Kenyon
‘It’s delightful to know that as we old-timers pass into senescence, our rivers will be in capable hands.’–Willem Lange (1935)
‘The door that nobody else will go in at, seems always to swing open widely for me.”–Clara Barton (1821-1912)
‘It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.’–WH Auden (1907-1973)
‘I feel so fully alive when I’m really into a story [ie., writing the story]. I feel like all my faculties are engaged, and this is where I’m meant to be. It’s probably what a racehorse feels like when it runs. This is what it’s meant to do, what its body is meant to do. This is what my mind is meant to do.’–Laura Hillenbrand (1967). As Joseph Campbell famously said, ‘Follow your bliss.’ i feel like that when doing art, when composing.
‘Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.’–James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937, author of Peter Pan) ‘
‘Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.’–Horace Mann (1796-1859)
‘Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.’–August Wilson (1945-2005)
‘I would strongly advise you to make up your mind, shoulder your gun, muster all your spirits, and start in search of the interesting unknown.’–John James Audubon (1785-1851)
‘A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.’–Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)
‘All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts.’–As You Like It, Shakespeare (c1564-1616)
‘Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.’
And, ‘No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.’–Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916)
‘I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.’–Dr Seuss/Theodor Geisel (1904-1991)
‘Animals cannot speak, but can you and I not speak for them and represent them? Let us all feel their silent cry of agony and let us all help that cry to be heard in the world.’–Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904-1986)
‘The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved–loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.’–Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
‘A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. We should be blessed if we live in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass’.–Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
‘Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.’–Cezanne (1839-1906)
‘There is no blue without yellow or orange.’–van Gogh (1853-1890)
‘I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.’–Desmond Morris (1928)
‘I didn’t become [a conscientious objector]; I always was one. I thought all right-thinking people would behave that way.’–William E. Stafford (1914–1993)
‘Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style–but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not…. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.’–Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
‘I feel that when you look out into the world, the world is funny. And people are funny. And that people always try to make each other laugh. I’ve never been to a dinner party where nobody said anything funny.’–Lorrie Moore (1957)
‘We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.’–Konrad Adenauer, (1876-1967)
‘In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.’–Mortimer Adler (1902-2001, not the psychologist but educator)
‘Poetry matters to people in this country; poetry is a place we can go to for comfort, celebration, when we’re in love, when we’re bereaved, and sometimes for events that happen to us as a nation. Poetry comes from the imagination, from memories, from experience, from events both personal and public’.–Carol Ann Duffy (1955)
‘No one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.’–Charles de Lint (1951)
‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’–Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)
‘If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.’–James Thurber (1894-1961)
‘I read a book of Einstein’s, in which he said that anyone who’s not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle.’– Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)
‘Without minute neatness of execution, the sublime cannot exist! Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas.’–William Blake (1757-1827)
‘The best theology is probably no theology; just love one another.’–Charles Schulz (1922-2000)
‘Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;–they are the life, the soul of reading;–take them out of this book for instance,–you might as well take the book along with them.’–Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’–George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans–1819-1880)
‘It was nuts because they [comic book artists] have to do the same thing over and over every day, like monks, and then I tried my own and realized I was a monk myself, inside.’–Marjane Satrapi (1969)
‘Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it’s the latter, so I sign up.’–Margaret Atwood (1939)
‘I love research [me too] …. I describe a [sailor] character who has to go belowdecks, and I think, ‘So what is belowdecks?’…. Then I have to get books about ship building, ship history, immigration history, so I can write a little more…. I love learning that way–lurching from subject area to subject area. When you’re lit by your own purposes, it’s astonishing how easily you can leap into a new field and get to that centre of passion.’ and ‘I think science and writing are utterly the same thing. They are completely rooted in passion and desire, if they’re any good at all. You can fall in love with the natural world in the same way you fall in love with a person. There’s that same sense of helplessness, of lacking control over how much of your life you want to devote to it.’–Andrea Barrett (1954). i think of learning that way–lurching from subject area to subject area–lifelong learning–being curious–as one thing leads to another, tho ‘lurching’ is a good word.
‘I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.’–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922-2007)
‘Who loves not woman, wine, and song remains a fool his whole life long.’–Martin Luther (1483-1546)
‘In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.’–Cesar Chavez (1927-1993)
‘A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.’–Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
‘I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.’–Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
‘Life is a four-letter word.’–Lenny Bruce (1925-1966)
‘There is nothing stronger than a heart which loves and is freely given.’–Jean Vanier (1928)
‘Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.’–Alice Childress (1916-1994)
‘A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.’–Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)
‘Writing is thinking on paper.’–William Zinsser (1922-2015)
‘Poetry is a life-cherishing force, for poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread for the hungry.’–Mary Oliver (1935)
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant–/…/the Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind–‘–Dickinson (1830-1886)
‘There’s no sauce in the world like hunger.’–Cervantes (1547-1616)
‘A man’s life is interesting primarily when he has failed–I well know. For it is a sign that he has tried to surpass himself.’–Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
‘Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.’–Eaven Boland (1944)
‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’–Robert J Oppenheimer (1904-1967), on the test of the first nuclear bomb, 1945-07-16, quoting the Bhagavad Gita.
‘Anyone who moved through those years [WWII] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.’–William Golding (1911-1993)
‘There are few things in this world which it is worthwhile to get angry about, and they are just the things anger will not improve.’–Henry Jarvis Raymond (1820-1869)
‘What power has love but forgiveness?’–William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
‘Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.’ Montaigne (1533-1592)
‘Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man [sic] has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.’–Jean Arp (1887-1948)
‘Homo liber nulla de re minus quam de morte cogitat; et ejus sapientia non mortis sed vitae meditatio est.’ (There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life.)– Spinoza (1632-1677), Ethics, Pt IV, Prop. 67
‘No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me.’–D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
‘A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.’–Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
‘I am not an eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.’–Edith Sitwell (1897-1964)
‘You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that.’– Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
‘People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.’–Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
‘I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.’–Mae West (1893-1980)
‘What do you do? How do you write, create?’ You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.’–Charles Bukowski (1920–1994)
‘The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.’–Steve Martin (1945)
‘I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order—of feeling as well as argument—to a poem. But all my life, I’ve also been a person who’s made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That’s what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste?’–JD McClatchy (1945)
‘A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.’–John Updike (1932-2009)
‘Some of my characters now feel more grateful about simple things—breathing, buying groceries, sunlight—because I do.’ and ‘We don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.’–Andre Dubus (1936-1999), who was struck by a car and, like me, ended up in a wheelchair.
‘I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!’–Louise Bogan (1897-1971)
‘It is in knowledge that man has found his greatness and his happiness.’–James Smithson (1765-1829), after whom the Smithsonian is named.
‘Let your affairs be as two or three, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.’–Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)
‘Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That’s the secret.’–Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)
‘Thoreau is being every bit as revolutionary and anti-capitalistic as Karl Marx, but his solution depends on the actions of individuals rather than on the actions of armies and mobs. If you want a Marxist revolution, you have to join with others to overthrow the present system, but if you want a Thoreauvian revolution, you need to change only your own life, not that of others.’–Ken Kifer (1945-2003)

‘Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.’–Amelia Earhart (1897-1937?)
‘There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.’–Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
‘Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.’–Hemingway (1899-1961)
‘Laughter may well be the ultimate act of letting go and letting be: the music of the divine cosmos.’–Matthew Fox (1940)
‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.’–Thoreau (1817-18/62)
‘Choose only one master–Nature.’–Rembrandt (1606-1669)
‘Literature encourages tolerance–bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them also as possibilities.’–Northrop Frye (1912-1991)
‘Prayer is like a secret garden made up of silence and rest and inwardness. But there are a thousand and one doors into this garden and we all have to find our own.’–Jean Vanier (1928)
‘Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.’–Arthur Helps (1813-1875)
‘It is not what you believe that matters; it is how you respond with your heart and your actions.’–Pelagius (c. 354-418)

‘The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.’–Herman Hesse (1877-1962)
‘The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.’–George Sand (1804-1876)
‘There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.’–Bob Dylan (1941) in All Along The Watchtower (though Jimi Hendrix’s (1942-1970) version made it famous). This is similar to ‘Life is a jest, and all things show it,/I thought so once, and now I know it.’ by John Gay (1685-1732). Dylan’s song adds ‘But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate’. But what is our fate? Also, Ken Kifer (1945-2003–http://www.phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/humor/index.htm): ‘Considering what a crazy, illogical, mixed-up world we live in, it’s a good trait to have a well-developed sense of humor.’
‘The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand, and touch another person.’–Virginia Satir (1916-1988)
‘If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.’–Paul McCartney (1942)
‘Be kind to all, because everyone is fighting a great battle.’–Philo of Alexandria
(25BCE-50AD)
‘It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually turning into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too. I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.’–Anne Frank (1929-1945)
‘No one has ever become poor by giving.’–Anne Frank (1929-1945)
‘War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.’–JFK (1917-1963)
‘Compassion is not weakness and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.’–Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978)
‘The nowness of everything is absolutely wonderful…. If you see the present tense, boy do you see it, and boy can you celebrate it.’–Dennis Potter (1935-1994)
i counted 27 quotes by men before encountering my first women’s quote. and this is *my* list, too.
‘Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.’–Thomas Pynchon
‘I am a poet who has preferred not to distinguish in poetry between nature and humanity.’–Gary Snider
‘It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.’–Randall Jarrell
‘The person who abides in solitude and quiet is delivered from fighting three battles: hearing, speech, and sight. Then there remains one battle to fight–the battle of the heart.’–St Anthony The Great
‘Culture eats Christianity for breakfast.’–Peter Drucker, paraphrased by Richard Rohr
‘Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.’–Horace Mann
‘Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.’–Joseph Addison
‘You know more than you know.’–Jonah Lehrer
‘A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.’–Jerry Seinfeld
‘Freedom without structure is its own slavery.’–David Brooks
‘Wisdom is one of the few things in human life that does not diminish with age.’–Ram Dass
‘My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.’–Thornton Wilder
‘The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.’–Anatole France
‘In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.’–Thomas Jefferson
‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’–F. Scott Fitzgerald
‘Bad weather always looks worse through a window.’–Tom Lehrer
‘There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.’–Hobbes
‘Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds–all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.’–Edward Everett Hale
‘I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to Heaven. I’ll look around and say, It’s not bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’–San Francisco columnist Herb Caen
‘When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough.’–Nelson Algren
‘I’m going to stop writing the parts that people skim.’–James Patterson
‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’–Oscar Wilde
‘Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.’–Rainer Maria Rilke
‘Writing can’t change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.’–Leslie Marmon Silko
‘There is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love; because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power.’–Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
‘The highest of wisdom is continual cheerfulness: such a state, like the region above the moon, is always clear and serene.’–Michel de Montaigne
‘It is man’s tragedy that he cannot see himself as others see him…. “Our antiquarians,” Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “would spare themselves and us much exertion if they would but observe that similar conditions will produce similar manners.” When men are afraid, they make devils out of those they fear. And as men are, so also are states. For, as Plato pointed out long ago, states are not made “of oak and rock,” but of men, and as the men are, so will the states be.’–American Friends Service Committee, 1955
‘The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and a failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.’–Anthony Burgess
‘The pain passes but the beauty remains.’–Renoir [responding to Matisse on why he painted in spite of his painful arthritis]
‘Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.’–Steve Jobs
‘It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our everyday duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome.’–Laura Ingalls Wilder
‘The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.’–Norman Mailer
‘It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.’–Gertrude Stein
‘Books are humanity in print.’–Barbara Tuchman
‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.’–Edward Abbey
‘Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.’–Colette
‘Sometimes you can’t see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others.’–Ellen DeGeneres
‘I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.’–anne bronte, 1848
Writing well became ‘of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement.’–benjamin franklin
‘I try to see things in the framework of the teachings of ethical ideals of the world’s great religions. Those ideals are permanent through the centuries, and people who are touched by those or see them as the focus of their lives see that there is an ongoing struggle for justice in what we used to call the civilized world.’–ed file
‘The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up. That is possible for him who never argues and strives with men and facts, but in all experience retires upon himself, and looks for the ultimate cause of things in himself.’ –Albert Schweitzer
‘To move freely you must be deeply rooted.’–Bella Lewitsky, dancer, (1916-2004)
‘People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.’–Haruki Murakami
‘I think we have to prepare the mind in one way or another to accept the great uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater non-self.’–Aldous Huxley
‘In my deepest wound I found you, Lord, and it dazzled me.’–Augustine
‘Think enough and you won’t know anything.’–Kenneth Patchen
‘Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That’s the main content. The biggest thing in people’s lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know.’–Jim Harrison
‘ “Faith” is a fine invention / For gentlemen who see– / But microscopes are prudent / In an emergency.’–Emily Dickinson
‘His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.’–Lois McMaster Bujold
‘We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and bones.’–Thoreau
Julian of Norwich looked at one little hazelnut in the palm of her hand, and said ‘This is everything that is.’
‘Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.’–Richard Rohr
‘Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet, or cure cancer, or get rid of malaria.’–Bill Bryson
‘Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.’–James Thurber
‘My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.’–George Eliot
‘I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.’–Ann Patchett
‘Life [is] full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.’–Woody Allen
‘Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.’–Spinoza
‘Language is the archives of history.’–Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘Whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one’s own strange self on the page…. Writing or making anything — a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake — has self-respect in it. You’re working. You’re trying. You’re not lying down on the ground, having given up.’–Sharon Olds
‘Patience is also a form of action.’–Rodin (1840-1917)
‘Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best.’–Henry van Dyke (1852-1933)
‘Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.’–Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774 )
‘to be nobody but myself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.’–e.e. cummings
‘Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave, and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.’–Alice Childress
‘Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.’–François Mauriac
‘In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.’–Denise Levertov
‘We know not why or what, yet weave, forever weave.’–Walt Whitman
‘After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.’–Wallace Stevens
‘Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.’- -Mahatma Gandhi
‘Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.’–Samuel Johnson
‘The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.’–Jesse Owens
‘Falling short of perfection is a process that just never stops.’–William Shawn
‘There are four rules to life: ‘Be kind, be kind, be kind, be kind.’–Henry James
‘Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.’–Pico Iyer
‘What isn’t given to love is so much wasted.’–Apollinaire
‘Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse’–from ‘September 1, 1939‘ by WH Auden
‘There is only one question:/how to love this world.’–from ‘Spring‘ by Mary Oliver
‘The best things in life are not things’–graffiti quoted by Gary Snyder
‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’–Oscar Wilde
‘We are inspired by these moments to stretch past the boundaries of our own egos and see ourselves as part of a vast and interwoven whole…. Interconnectedness has a way of coming back on us, calling us to a never-ending cycle of introspection and conviction, forcing us to see and name our complicity in relationship.’ Gretta Vosper
‘i ask myself, is it just a wild flight of imagination to conceive of a world without war…. but someone must try.’–julia grace wales, quoted in the birth house by ami mckay, 125
‘and how could anyone believe/that anything in this world/is only what it appears to be’–Mary Oliver, from ‘WHAT IS IT?‘
‘The best theology is what we do when we stop doing theology and start living. Anything we write under the name of ‘theology’ flows from the life that is fully lived in all its loves and struggles, its dancing and lamenting.’–tina beattie
‘Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.’–Bismarck, quoted in Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
‘Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.’–Unknown
‘Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.’–Carl Gustav Jung
‘Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.’–W.C. Fields
‘If you believe everything you read, better not read.’–Japanese proverb
‘The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.’–Bill Watterson
‘Avoid fruits and nuts. You are what you eat.’–Jim Davis
‘just now a rock took fright when it saw me. it escaped by playing dead.’–norbert mayer[sp?]
‘what is to give light must endure burning.’–viktor frankl
‘DARE 2 B HAPPEE’–bill bissett
‘love and pain, love and pain
are companions in this age.’–milton acorn
‘Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethic. We need a boundless ethic which will include the animals also.… the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.’–Albert Schweitzer, 1924
‘One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.’– Gretchen Rubin
‘When I despair, I remember that throughout history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always…whenever you are in doubt that that is God’s way – the way the world is meant to be. Think of that and then try to do His way.’–Mahatma Gandhi
‘Writing is a form of spiritual practice. In a way, to write is to affirm the existence of one’s self. But it could also be a way to develop oneself at the same time.’–The Venerable Phra Paisal Visalo
‘the most important thing that we can do for the healing of our world is to hear inside ourselves, the sounds of the earth crying.’–thich naht hanh
‘I’m not sure all of that sank in.’
‘Of course not.’ [Socrates] laughed. ‘Words mean little unless you realize the truth of it yourself. And when you do, you’ll be free at last.’–Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior)
‘Moderation? It’s mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It’s the devil’s dilemma. It’s neither doing nor not doing. It’s the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It’s for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation…is lukewarm tea, the devil’s own brew.’–Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior)
‘There is no need to search; achievement leads to nowhere. It makes no difference at all, so just be happy now! Love is the only reality of the world, because it is all One, you see. And the only laws are paradox, humor and change. There is no problem, never was, and never will be. Release your struggle, let go of your mind, throw away your concerns, and relax into the world. No need to resist life, just do your best. Open your eyes and see that you are far more than you imagine. You are the world, you are the universe; you are yourself and everyone else, too! It’s all the marvelous Play of God. Wake up, regain your humor. Don’t worry, just be happy. You are already free!’–Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior)
‘There is nothing to practice. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don’t disturb your mind with seeking.’–Nisargadatta Maharaj
‘The search for Reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings, for it destroys the world in which you live.’–Nisargadatta Maharaj
‘If knowledge hangs around your neck like pearls instead of chains
You are a lucky man’–alan price
‘There is something miraculous about such a correspondence between nature and mind, though it too must have an explanation. It might be the result of sheer molecular accident. But it seems more likely that it is the result of a little of that and then a whole lot of co-evolution: one theory holds that Papaver somniferum [opium poppy] is a flower whose evolution has been directly influenced by the pleasure, and relief from pain, it happened to give a certain primate with a gift for horticulture and experiment. The flowers that gave people the most pleasure were the ones that produced the most offspring. It’s not all that different from the case of the Bourbon rose or the beefsteak tomato, two other plants whose evolution has been guided by the hand of human interest.’–michael pollan
‘This is the supreme vision, in which we know that we are not a little part, a little cog, that we are the All. And this knowledge that we are all, that I am all, I am one, there are no parts in me, … brings unutterable security and immeasurable joy in plunging into life…. In Sanskrit this is called lila.’–Easwaran
‘Belonging is the place where we grow to maturity and discover what it means to be human and to act in a human way. It is a place we need in order to live and to act in society in justice, in truth, without seeking power, privileges, and honours for our own self-glory. It is the place where we learn to be humble but also audacious and to take initiatives in working with others. It is the place where our deepest self rises up into our consciousness and so we become more fully ourselves, more fully human.’–vanier again
‘We all belong to the universe; we all receive from it and give to it; we are all parts of a whole. The danger for people today is to forget that and to think that they are the centre; that everyone else is there for them. People must die to this form of destructive egoism and be reborn in love, where they learn to receive from others and to give to them.’–vanier
‘This is the supreme vision, in which we know that we are not a little part, a little cog, just after my own personal profit and pleasure like that, that we are the All. And this knowledge that we are all, that I am all, I am one, there are no parts in me, there is no part in the universe, this acknowledgment brings unutterable security and immeasurable joy in plunging into life…. In Sanskrit this is called lila‘–Easwaran
‘

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead

This famous quote hangs over my desk, as well as the desks of many people with the hubris and optimism to believe they can change the world for the better. It seems implausible, yet time and again history has proven it true. Virtually every major shift in cultural history can trace its origins to the work of a small group, often gathered around an innovative thinker or body of thought.’–alan atkisson
‘To look forward, to want life, means we have to be willing to look backwards and become more conscious of all those who have hurt us, all that is broken in us and that has brought us inner deaths, hurts that we may have hidden and stifled. It means that we acknowledge the story of our origins, of our own lives, see and accept our brokenness and the times we also have hurt others. When we have accepted who we are and what we need in order to grow in compassion and peacemaking, we can move forward to give life. To forgive is a gift of God that permits us to let go of our past hurts.’–Vanier, Finding Peace, 47-48
‘if your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it.’–jonathan winters
from ‘hope in desperate times’: ‘Even if we can’t get beyond our veneer of individualism, and the collapse scenario unfolds, the pressure on living systems will drop dramatically with the population. With the pressure off, Earth will repair itself. Human culture, chastened by the experience, will sooner or later begin its reorientation into far more appropriate forms. If we love humankind, that civilization will be us. Take heart today and, whatever actions you are drawn to will, when the dust settles, leave us better off.’–mike nickerson
‘i never think of the future–it comes soon enough.’–einstein
Uruguay’s ‘poor’ president, the fascinating Jose Mujica, who’s declared worth is $1800, says, ‘This is a matter of freedom. If you don’t have many possessions then you don’t need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself. I may appear to be an eccentric old man… But this is a free choice.’–Jose Mujica
‘We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.’–Douglas Adams
there are 3 quotes here; read on: ‘i gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which i must stop and look fear in the face…. i say to myself, i’ve lived through this and can take the next thing that comes along…. we must do the things we think we cannot do.’–eleanor roosevelt
‘believing in our hearts that who we are is enough is the key to a more satisfying and balanced life.’–ellen sue stern
‘most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.’–dale carnegie
‘The more you love, the more you learn to love.’–Easwaran
‘walking is man’s [or woman’s or child’s] best exercise.’–hippocrates, quoted in this cool video. for those of us who can’t walk, maybe there’s triking, or hydrotherapy, or anything.
‘somebody has to do something; it is just incredibly pathetic it has to be us.’–jerry garcia
‘When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.’–Mister Rogers
‘Maybe someday
Those words will be heard
By future generations
Ridin’ on the highways that we built
Maybe they’ll have a better understanding
Check it out’–john mellancamp
‘stay curious‘
‘The arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.’–martin luther king, quoted by becky tarbotton
‘the single most important thing you can teach is character’–Barry Schwartz
RAN is rainforest action network, and becky tarbotton (1973-2012) was its ED–‘we don’t know exactly what it is that creates change. we don’t know exactly. it takes everything from science all the way to faith–and it’s the fertile place right in the middle, that, that spot where those things come together, that’s where really exceptional campaigning happens, and that’s where RAN strives to be, all the time.’–becky tarbotton
‘We can no longer have everything we want, but we can be more than we ever imagined.’–Howard Jerome
‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.’–thoreau
‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.’–Keynes
‘we are human beings, not human doings’–angela hubbard, cheryle sullivan
‘a paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention’–alan watts
‘Writing is a struggle against silence.’–Carlos Fuentes
‘Pessimism is an indulgence. If you’re a father, you can’t be pessimistic.’–wade davis
‘coincidence is only god’s way of remaining anonymous’–vac verikaitis
‘we are living in a miracle’–brian swimme
‘there’s an aboriginal group in south america that says in order to become human you must dwell on the immensities of the universe. let’s look at the converse of that statement. if you don’t dwell on the immensities of the universe, you don’t become human. you become a really good corporate manager.’–brian swimme
‘If a musician as great as Ed Bickert can’t stand the way he sounds, then what do my worries amount to, what’s to become of my woeful self? … Sometimes you just have to suck up the bad times and hang in there.’–jazz bassist steve wallace
‘Life has three aspects: Paradox, Humor, and Change. Paradox: Life is a mystery; don’t waste time figuring it out. Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure. Change: Know that nothing stays the same.’–Peaceful Warrior
‘Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh!’–Chinese Zen master, quoted in the book by alan watts
‘And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise: you don’t die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.’–alan watts
‘wonder is not a disease. wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men [sic] from other animals, and
intelligent and sensitive people from morons.’–alan watts
‘life is what you make it.’–steven wells, ALS survivor of 33 years and counting
‘as a species we’re doomed by hope, then?’–margaret atwood, oryx and crake
‘a culture is no better than its woods’ meaning, the basis for human achievement is natural capital–wh auden
‘to think or not-to-think – that is the question. If you do not think, instead accepting other’s authoritative rulings, what difference are you to a robot, a programmed computer?’–juliet bennett
‘these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’–paul (1 Corinthians)
if you’re not suffering, you’re suffering–a paraphrase of miles davis, who might’ve said ‘If you’re not making a mistake, it’s a mistake.’
‘soon man will count all his days, and then smaller segments of the day, and then smaller still–until the counting consumes him, and the wonder of the world he has been given is lost.’–mitch albom, in the time keeper
‘it’s the little things citizens do. that will make the difference. my little thing is planting trees.’–wangari maathai
‘life is short; be quick to love.’
‘There is a light within each person, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness.’–elaine pagels
‘I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.’–eb white
‘The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.’–Paul Dirac
‘The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it is called the present.’–anon.
‘What a man can be, he must be.’–Maslow
‘But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.’–Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
‘The relationship people have with authority is often linked to the relationship they had as children with their parents. When this was difficult the children may be left with a lasting anger and suspicion of all authority. They will rebel against a leader. The relationship is a complicated one and it is hard to talk together with simplicity and truth because everything is colored by childish fears and attitudes.’–Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 235
‘if we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.’–yann martel, life of pi
‘A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it or it could be
who’s hungry and where their mouth is or
who’s out of work and where the job is or
who’s broke and where the money is or
who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.’–woody guthrie
‘the lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. they are broad and deep as well as long.’–edmund burke
‘Know Yourself–Inside each of us is a little tyrant who wants power and the associated prestige, who wants to dominate, to be superior and to control. We feel we are the only ones to seek the truth – and that, sometimes, in the name of God. There is nothing more terrible than a tyrant using religion as his or her cover.’–Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, 216
‘The moment is so big – Yet, the entrance is so small. There is only a fleeting glance and then it’s gone.’–arlo guthrie
‘Love is doing nothing which bruises others; it is putting the interests of others above our own. It is not being irritable, bitter, aggressive or searching for the evil in others; it is not rejoicing in injustice. It is seeking truth in all things.’–Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, 134
‘Perhaps the essential quality for anyone who lives in community is patience; a recognition that we, others and the whole community must take time to grow. Nothing is achieved in a day. If we are to live in community, we need to be friends of time.’–Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, 134
‘It is always easier to accept the weakness of people with a handicap – we are there precisely because we accept it – than our own weakness, which often takes us by surprise! We want to see only good qualities in ourselves. Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.’–Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, 131
‘To become a man is to be responsible; to be ashamed of miseries that you did not cause.’–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
‘I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.’–thoreau
‘Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language–not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.’–emerson
‘there is vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique…. you have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. keep the channel open…. [there is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. there is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.’–martha graham
‘i am large, i contain multitudes.’–walt whitman, quoted in blessed unrest
‘that dark laboratory we call the soil.’–aldo leopold
‘Many people confuse authority and the power of efficiency, as if the first role of people with responsibility is to take decisions, command effectively and so exercise power. But their role first of all is to be a person to whom others can turn for help and advice, to provide security, to affirm, to support, to encourage and to guide.’–Jean Vanier
‘Human health and well-being are dependent upon the well being of the whole planet Earth.’–Ian Mason
‘Pain is never permanent.’–St. Theresa of Avila
‘The endurance of darkness is preparation for great light.’–St. John of the Cross
‘As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.’–Carl Gustav Jung
‘How hard it is for people to live without someone to look down upon–really to look down upon. It is not just that they feel cheated out of someone to hate. It is that they are compelled to look more closely into themselves and what they don’t like about themselves.’–Martin Luther King
‘We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.’–Howard Zinn
‘We are not human beings on a spiritual journey; we are spiritual beings on a human journey.’–Teilhard de Chardin
‘vision is the ability to see the unseen’–Jonathan Swift
‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality…. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.’~Thomas Berry
‘You cannot have well people on a sick planet.’ ~Thomas Berry
‘When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.’–Max Planck
‘Put on light-coloured clothes and some perfume, take care of your body and do everything you can to fight against the forces of darkness. It is not an easy struggle, but it is worthwhile.’–Jean Vanier
‘Avoid the poison in your life that brings you turmoil.’–Jean Vanier
‘In exchange for freedom, we must give up predictability and control.’–eisenstein–one of jkz’s preconditions is letting go–be a leaf on/in the water, give up the illusion of being in control; another is trust; i would add faith, which is why i choose the stillpoint pgm instead of mbsr
‘To learn the language of the world—what a beautiful and fruitful definition of science that would be!’–eisenstein
‘Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.’– Keith Johnstone
‘To be in love is to dissolve boundaries, to expand oneself to include an other.’–eisenstein
‘When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. My life is a movement between these two’–Nisargadatta Maharaj
‘DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.’–Good Omens, Terry Pratchett
‘Laughter is excellent for the digestion.’–vanier
Paul Hawken–‘Waste is food.’
‘As a child, reality is whatever one makes of it.’–Joseph Chilton Pearce
‘[When we start helping the weak and the poor to rise] everyone will begin to change. Those who have power and riches will start to become more humble, and those who are rising up will leave behind their need to be victims, their need to be angry or depressed….This is the spirituality of life, that helps people to rise up and take their place. It is not a spirituality of death. Jesus wants those who have been crushed to rise up and those who have power to discover that there is another road, a road of sharing and compassion.’–Jean Vanier
These are the ‘last days of ancient sunlight’–Thom Hartman
‘He [God] is the wildest being in existence. The presence of His spirit in us is our wildness, our oneness with the wilderness of Creation. That is why subduing the things of nature to human purposes is so dangerous and why it so often results in evil, in separation and desecration’–Wendell Berry
‘if i sing when i cook, the food is going to be happy.’–pasquale carpino
”The people with the best sense of what is essential to a community, of what gives and maintains its spirit, are often doing very humble, manual tasks. It is often the poorest person – the one who has a handica[p, is] ill or old – who is the most prophetic. People who carry responsibility must be close to them and know what they think, because it is often they who are free enough to see with the greatest clarity the needs, beauty and pain of the community.’–Jean Vanier
‘We flee from meeting people; we would rather do things for them. But if we are to love, we have to meet.’–jean vanier
‘The logic is backwards. Genius is the result of doing what you love, not a prerequisite for it.’–charles eisenstein
‘Machines help us do things more quickly and efficiently, but they can also destroy some community activities. Machines can also throw the weakest people out of work and this would be sad, because their small contribution to the housework or cooking is their way of giving something to the community. People who are capable of doing things very quickly with the help of machines become tremendously busy, always active, in charge of everyone – a bit like machines themselves.’–Jean Vanier
‘Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun.’–Charles Eisenstein–do you seek play or entertainment?
‘There is a struggle inside you between these two parts. It’s as if at times your heart becomes a battlefield! The secret part, full of light, seems so small and weak in the face of the discouraging and morbid part, which seems enormous and overwhelming. However, if you light a small candle in a dark room, everything is lit up. It is a matter of trusting in this little light in the deepest part of your being which can gradually chase away the darkness.’–Jean Vanier

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