magnificently unprepared/for the long littleness of life.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
--Ursula K. LeGuin
We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: by doing a deed; by experiencing a value; and by suffering.
--victor frankl
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
--barry lopez, arctic dreams
However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
--henry david thoreau
+ fictions&fires
6:16 PM
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plangere, latin: to strike, or to lament.
in the depth of winter i finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
--albert camus
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to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
-- ee cummings
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