Quotes
Compiled by David L.Gilles-Thomas

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large: I contain multitudes.
- Walt Whitman

Listen. This is just a dream. But very clever people can hear dreams. So please just listen. I know you're afraid, but being afraid is all right. Because didn't anybody ever tell you, fear is a superpower? Fear can make you faster, and cleverer and stronger. And one day, you're going to come back to this barn and on that day you are going to be very afraid indeed. But that's OK. Because if you're very wise and very strong, fear doesn't have to make you cruel or cowardly, fear can make you kind. It doesn't matter if there's nothing under the bed or in the dark so long as you know it's OK to be afraid of it. So listen. If you listen to nothing else listen to this. You're always going to be afraid, even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like a companion. A constant companion always there. But that's OK, as fear can bring us together. Fear can be bring you home. I'm going to leave you something just so you'll always remember. Fear makes companions of us all.
- from Dr. Who, "Listen"

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
- Friedrich Engels

And that is what we need... that is what we must have. Imagination to grasp the problem that is offered. Imagination to peer around the corner. A dreaming contemplation of what is necessary to be done, and then the vigorous initiative to meet the challenge that the dream may bring.
- Clifford D. Simak

By not quite accepting, because they do not please us, things that are so, we spend our entire lives making meaningless gestures somewhere next door to reality.
- Nan Shin

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.
- Ransom Riggs (Hollow City)

Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
- J.R.R. Tolkien

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It is the transition that is troublesome.
- Isaac Asimov

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.
- J. K. Rowling

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.
- James Joyce

I do not know what I want; but I know that I want it.
- O. Henry

We were safe there in the middle,
But the view is from the edge.
- David Wilcox

Rule 1: It doesn't matter. Whatever you think matters -- doesn't. Follow this rule, & it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late, or early; if you are here, or if you are there; if you said it, or did not say it; if you were clever, or if you were stupid; if you are having a bad hair day, or a no hair day; if your boss looks at you cockeyed; if your girlfriend or boyfriend looks at you cockeyed; if you are cockeyed; if you don't get that promotion, or prize, or house, or if you do. It doesn't matter.
- Roger Rosenblatt, 58 Rules for Aging

It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
- Adam Jensen

I can't say where I'll be in 5 years; 5 years ago, I could never have foreseen where I am now. I don't draft 5-year plans -- I just do the best job I can, and trust that it will lead me to where I'm supposed to be next.
- Barbara Grogan (President, Western Industrial Contractors)

Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
- James Matthew Barrie

"The Just"
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workman playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
- Jorge Luis Borges

Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when the slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write!
- Teacher's Conference, 1703.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
- Melville, Moby Dick

I'm the office Placebo--I don't actually do anything, but people think I'm working.
- Gary Loeser

All's well that ends.
- J. Coyne

It's not just getting the notes, it's the effort it takes to hit them that makes it exciting.
- Stan Kenton

What really counts is to strip the soul naked. Painting or poetry is made as we make love; a total embrace, prudence thrown to the wind, nothing held back.
- Joan Miro

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
- Tolstoy

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.
- Reinhold Niebuhr

You are almost always capable of being the craziest person in the room, even a very large room.
- James DeRossitt

Commit to the next thing that occurs to you.
- Ted Scarlett

A fold is an organised crumple
- Ard van der Horst

If life bites, bite it back
- Brian Silverstein

People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
- Chuck Palahniuk

But who is more ignorant? The man who cannot define lightning, or the man who does not respect its awesome power?
- Dan Brown

...To face unafraid, the plans that we made...
- Dick Smith

Do not dare not to dare.
- C. S. Lewis

Passion is the prosody of intelligence.
- Brenda Laurel

The basis of optimism is sheer terror
- Oscar Wilde

Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
- (unknown)

He uses statistics like a drunken man uses lampposts ... for support rather than illumination.
- Andrew Lang

Take your heart to work.
- Meryl Streep

A change imposed is a change opposed.
- Spencer Johnson

If you do not change, you can become extinct.
- Spencer Johnson

What would you do if you weren't afraid?
- Spencer Johnson

I am sincere about life, but I'm not serious about it.
- Alan Watts

If you thought what I said was meaningless and nonsense, then forget it. No problem.
- Dalai Lama at UB, 2006

I always wanted a happy ending... Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.
- Gilda Radner

Everything you can imagine is real.
- Pablo Picasso

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
- Edith Wharton

Silence is a text easy to misread.
- A. A. Attanasio

Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere --
even from a broken web
- Adrienne Rich

Sometimes of late years I find myself thinking the most beautiful sight in the world might be the birds taking over New York after the last man has run away to the hills. I will never live to see it, of course, but I know just how it will sound because I've lived up high and I know the sort of watch birds keep on us. I've listened to sparrows tapping tentatively on the outside of air conditioners when they thought no one was listening, and I know how other birds test the vibrations that come up to them through the television aerials. 'Is he gone?' they ask, and the vibrations come up from below, 'Not yet, not yet.'
- Loren Eiseley

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
- George Eliott

Failure is practice.
- Marilee Jones

We've always been here and we'll always be here. We are a specific arrangement of particles and this instant is infinite. Did we luck out, or didn't we? The odds against this sentence having ever being typed, much less the odds against you reading it were inconceivable. Smile, because the fact that you're able to is almost impossible to comprehend.
- Jeffrey Rowland

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
that move in the sun and have
close, reliable friends
in the earth, in the air, in the rock.
- William Stafford

"After Ritsos"
You know that moment in the summer dusk
when the sunbathers have all gone home to mix drinks
and you are alone on the beach
when the waves begin to nibble
on the abandoned sand castles -
And further out, over the erupted face
of the water stained almost pink
there are a few clouds that hold
entire rooms inside of them - rooms where no one lives -
in the hair
of the light that soon will go
grey and then black. It is the moment
when even the man who mops the floor
in the execution room of the prison
stops to look up into the silence
that grows like smoke or the dusk itself.
And your mind becomes almost visible
and you know there is nothing
that is not mysterious. And that no moment
is less important than this moment.
And that imprisonment is not possible.
- Malena Morling

No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance.
- Mervyn Peake

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
- Adrienne Rich

My commitment is to truth, not to consistency.
- Mahatma Gandhi

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends -- It gives a lovely light.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

You are almost always capable of being the craziest person in the room, even a very large room.
- James DeRossitt

Commit to the next thing that occurs to you.
- Ted Scarlett

If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must expect to employ methods never before attempted.
- Francis Bacon

Now here's a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days -- that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls -- adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous.
- Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods

In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. . . . There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could rediscover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
-Marilyn Frye

One thing I've learned in hanging around Tomorrowland is that, if you wait long enough, the future never gets here. It's something to look forward to.
- seen in Newsweek magazine, March 29 1982

All I know is that I began to feel things again. Whatever I was, I knew there was only one way back to the world and that was to use the place to talk. So I saw the great and wonderful Dr. Wick three times a week and I let her hear every thought in my head.
- From the film Girl, Interrupted

I've wasted a year of my life. Maybe everybody out there is a liar. And maybe the whole world is "stupid" and "ignorant". But I'd rather be in it. I'd rather be fucking in it, then down here with you.
- From the film Girl, Interrupted

So I address my life, I consider my metaphors, and I begin - by doing the same thing I did on the trail. I put one foot in front of the other. And I walk.
- Scott Huler

The way to do is to be
-Laotzu

Existence is beyond the power of words to define. Terms may be used but are none of them absolute.
-Laotzu

Mine is a stiff and woodenish mind unable to vault from groove to groove.
-Arthur Ransome

We cannot perceive unless we anticipate, but we must not see only what we anticipate.
-U. Neisser, 1976

Right now you're just browsing through time. Choose the things you'll be proud of, the things that last...
-from the film Peggy Sue Gets Married

In an environment with much pressure to avoid all mistakes, one ends up doing everything wrong.
-O. Ivar Lovaas, 1989

There is always a risk in being alive, and if you are more alive there is more risk.
-Ibsen

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
-Henry Miller

Confusion is the state of promise, the fertile void where surprise is possible again. Confusion is in fact the state we are in, and we should be wise to cultivate it.
-Paul Goodman

One who knows his lot to be the lot of all men is a safe man to guide them, one who recognizes all men as members of his own body is a sound man to guard them.
- Laotzu

He who feels punctured
must once have been a bubble,
he who feels unarmed
must have carried arms,
he who feels belittled
must have been consequential,
he who feels deprived
must have had privilege,
whereas a man with insight
knows that to keep under is to endure.
What happens to a fish pulled out of a pond?
Or an implement of state pulled out of a scabbard?
Unseen, they survive.
- Laotzu

The way to use life is to do nothing through acting,
the way to use life is to do everything through being.
When a leader knows this,
his land naturally goes straight.
And the world's passion to stray from straightness
is checked at the core
by the simple unnameable cleanness
through which men cease from coveting,
and to a land where men cease from coveting
peace comes of course.
- Laotzu

As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone,
so to yield with life solves the insoluble:
to yield, I have learned, is to come back again.
But this unworded lesson,
this easy example,
is lost upon men.
- Laotzu

Laotzu is one of our chief weapons against tanks, artillery and bombs.
- H. Maurer

Even though the Ship may go down, the Journey goes on.
- Margaret Mead

To see a world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wildflower:
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour.
-William Blake

To walk we have to lean forward, lose our balance, and begin to fall. We let go, constantly, of the previous stability, falling, all the time, trusting that we will find a succession of new stabilities with each step. The fullest living is a constant dying of the past, enjoying the present fully, but holding it lightly; letting go without clinging and moving freely into new experiences. Our experience of the past and of those dear to us is not lost at all, but remains richly within us.
- Robin Skynner

The surest test if a man be sane is if he accepts life whole, as it is, without needing by measure or touch to understand the measureless untouchable source of its images, the measureless untouchable source of its substances, the source which, while it appears dark emptiness, brims with a quick force farthest away and yet nearest at hand from oldest time unto this day, what more need I know of the origin than this?
- Laotzu

The world, indeed, is like a dream and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage. Like the apparent distances in a picture, things have no reality in themselves but are like the haze of heat.
- Buddha

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS:
(I)
I walk, down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost...I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
(II)
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
(III)
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in...it's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
(IV)
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
(V)
I walk down another street.
- Portia Nelson

One is free from depression when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one's own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.
- Alice Miller

Public controversy deals in stereotypes, never in subtleties.
- Lee J. Cronbach

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
- Aldous Huxley

As I see it, psychology has enough liberals, at least at policy-making level and in the universities. What we need are more radicals, people for whom liberal reform is not only too slow but too short-sighted about how much change is needed. We need more outraged critics, not more tamed insiders.
- Dennis Fox

If some of our thoughts, feelings are unacceptable to us, we want to disown them but only at the cost of disowning valuable parts of ourselves. Your ability to cope with the world becomes less and less.
- Fritz Perls

What is like to be a dreamed person when the alarm rings?
- (unknown)

An intelligence that is not humane is the most dangerous thing in the world.
- Ashley Montagu

The perfect way is without
difficulty,
Save that it avoids picking and
choosing...
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and
wrong.
The conflict between right and
wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
- Seng-Ts'an

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.
- Spinoza

We have an uncommonly good ability to find a signal even in total noise.
- Baruch Fischhoff

When there is no wind, row.
- Portuguese Proverb

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
- Oscar Wilde

Some things have to be believed to be seen.
- Ralph Hodgson

All things, to give light, must endure burning.
- Goethe

One moon shows in every pool;
in every pool, the one moon.
- Zen Forest Saying

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen

My little stomach is my world, my head is my eternity, and my hands, two wonderful suns. My legs are time's pendulums, and my dirty feet are two splendid starting points for my philosophy. Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the only difference being that a belch is more satisfying.
- Jons (the Knight's squire), from The Seventh Seal, by Ingmar Bergman

[When asked if he had but a single gift to bequeath to the next generation, Ray Bradbury replied:] ...The gift to see that not all Republicans are evil, that not all Democrats are evil, that not all Communists are evil, that not all Negroes are evil, that not all anything is evil. The ability to see the paradox in every person.
- Ray Bradbury

The measure of a man's spiritual evolution is his acceptance of the unacceptable.
- Dalai Lama

When geometric diagrams and digits
are no longer the keys to living things,
when people who go about singing or kissing
know deeper things than the great scholars,
when society is returned once more
to unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
and when light and darkness mate
once more and make something entirely transparent,
and people see in poems and fairy tales
the true history of the world,
then our entire twisted nature will turn
and run when a single secret word is spoken.
- Novalis (1800) (translated by Robert Bly)

There are no ethical truths; there are just clarifications of particular ethical problems. Take advantage of these clarifications and work out your own existence. You are mistaken to think that anyone ever had the answers. There are no answers. Be brave and face up to it.
- Donald Kalish

Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.
- Paul Tillich

Ready, fire, aim.
- T. Peters & R. Waterman, In Search of Excellence

Life is not a flow chart, it is a cobweb.
- unknown

Reality is "an endless instant"
- Octavio Paz

We are what we pretend to be
- Kurt Vonnegut

We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.
- The Talmud

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
- Sean O'Casey

If a therapist doesn't dive down to meet the Wild Man or Wild Woman, he or she will try to heal words. The healing energy stored in waterfalls, trees, clay, horses, dogs, porcupines, llamas, otters belong to the domain of the Wild People. Therapists will have understood this when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room.
- Robert Bly

Beyond our innocent shores, it is understood that the past is not always knowable and never recuperable, that there is sometimes nothing to be done, and that reality conforms neither to our desires nor to our schemes, psychic or material. There is chance, and fate, and tragedy...That is the splendor and misery of being an adult, a condition from which we should not want to and, more to the point, cannot recover.
- David Rieff

Mediocrity requires aloofness to preserve its dignity.
- unknown

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
- Paul Vale'ry, 1895

I take on about 50 times more than anyone can do, and I work at about 2 percent efficiency. So every day I'm fighting a factor of 2,500, and every day I fall eight years more behind...
- Murray Gell-Mann (particle physicist and Nobel laureate)

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great crisis, maintain their neutrality.
- Dante

Don't trust anyone who isn't angry.
- John Trudell

Where change takes place and where the earth is replenished we find volcanoes. And the lava which flows from volcanoes becomes a rich soil where luxuriant forests grow.
- Susan Griffin

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.
- Rebecca West, 1913

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.
- Rainer Rilke

It's opener there
in the wide open air.
- Theodor S. Geisel (Dr. Suess)

A theory that is not tested fails to develop.
- (unknown)

You aren't anyone really, you never were. Oh, you thought you were when your head was too small for your illusions; but illusions aren't important now. You don't have to be anything, even yourself, because yourself was just something you had to make up. And then you thought you had to carry it around with you. What a relief to lay it down and walk away and forget it. Just to be part of what's around you is enough.
- Gordon Bok

My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
- Hermann Weyl

A dissertation is like pregnancy...You have to go through with it, and if you don't, then you stay pregnant all your life.
- Joan Rodman, Ph.D.

To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
- unknown

"...Go through the motions, Adam."
"What motions?"
"Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true."
"Why should I?" Adam asked.
"You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow."
- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Don’t you see?” he cried. "The American Standard translationn [of the Bible] orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in 'Thou shalt,' meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—'Thou mayest'— that gives a choice. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt.' Nothing they do can interfere with what will be. But 'Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win. ... 'Thou mayest' -- that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if 'Thou mayest' -- it is also true that "Thou mayest not.' Don't you see?"
- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies. Do you know why you cannot wait for the shot and why you get out of breath before it has come? The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure."
- Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

A wise person hears one word, but understands two.
- a Yiddish proverb

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
- Soren Kierkegaard

If you can walk, you can dance
If you can talk, you can sing
- traditional African saying

Life is short and the task is great... You are not expected to complete the task, But you are also not free to ignore it.
- Rabbinic quote

Oh, the comfort
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
Having neither to weigh thoughts,
Nor measure words
but pouring them
All right out
just as they are
Chaff and grain together
Certain that a faithful hand will
Take and sift them
Keep what is worth keeping
And with the breath of kindness
Blow the rest away.
- Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
- Adrienne Rich

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
- Muriel Rukeyser

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
- Niestzsche

Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize "The stars are words" and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it's all in my mind.
- Jack Kerouac

When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
- Audre Lorde

Of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language in action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, "Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out, one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside."
- Audre Lorde

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. 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' Stanford commencement speech

Mental health doesn't mean making the pains go away. I don't believe they ever go away. I do believe that nearly every person...has the same warped impulses, the same scarlet id as the wobbliest of borderlines, the most florid of psychotics. Only the muscles to hold things in check - to channel and funnel - are stronger. I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while the pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds.
- Lauren Slater

They sell us this lie that love is gonna save us. […] Love isn’t gonna save us. It’s what we have to save. Pain makes us strong enough to do it. All our scars, our anger, our despair, it’s armor. Baby, God loves the sinners best because our fire burns bright, bright, bright. Burn with me.
- Legion, s2 e4

One of the greatest dividends of darkness is an increased sensitivity to the light.
- Martha Manning

Since it is all too clear, it takes time to grasp it.
- Wu-men

Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere --
even from a broken web.
- Adrienne Rich

You know that bullshit people say about how when you fall, you gotta get up? I reject that shit man. You know why? The whole thing is a fall. It can't help but be. A perpetual state of grasping in the dark. It's not about getting up, it's about stumbling. Stumbling in the right direction. It's the only way to move forward.
- Ray (from Mr. Robot, S2E3)

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
- Voltaire

You were on your way home when you died... (click here for the rest)
- Andy Weir

It is marvelous to have the sense that all living and moving is dropping, or going along with gravity. Afterall - the earth is falling around the sun, and, in turn, the sun is falling around some other star. For energy is precisely a taking of the line of least resistance. Energy is mass. The power of water is in following its own weight. All comes to him who weights.
- Alan Watts



© David L. Gilles-Thomas