Resilient

"The world is a tough place. No matter how tough you think you are, it will always bring you to your knees and keep you there...permanently, if you let it. You and nobody are ever going to hit as hard as life. But it isn't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward - how much you can take and keep moving forward."

With the grace of a woman

Inception

Flexible Force

Caught, captured within the grasp of an unknown,
captivating force as it cries, screams, whispers
quietly uttering its concealed mourning, its vehement
joy, this powerful display shaking, soaking,
overwhelming with persistent consistency, steadily
dripping, constant taunt, enraging reminder of such
small force, drenching, hiding within a clouded
mist as step by step it spreads across, throughout,
underneath, within, heating chilled skin with lost
sunbeams shining through trembling rainbows,
forgotten writing of a foreign language, spoken
by the clouds, the sun, the drip, drip, dripping.

Empty

Writing

“That's what I love about writing. Once you get the words down on paper, in print, they start to make sense. It's like you don't know what you think until it dribbles from your brain down your arm and into your hand and out through your fingers and shows up on the computer screen, and you read it and realize: That's really true; I believe that.” 

- Ellen Wittlinger, Hard Love

Dreamers

"All men dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act 
their dream with open eyes to make it possible." 

- T.E. Lawrence

Strength in Whispers

"Sometimes we lack the strength to communicate the things that matter and we end up whispering the things we want to shout."

Climber

Silent Whispers

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

The White Album by Joan Didion

Fading Glimmers

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

On Keeping a Notebook in Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Then one day you look in the rearview mirror of your existence and realize that you can see clear down the hill-less and curveless and bridgeless road of your life, straight to the maternity ward where you were born. And then you go to college. Where your bland past meekly follows, sluggishly scraping its feet on the floor.

I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

Waiting, Watching the Sky

Some say they feel it in their mouth, welling up, overwhelming. I feel it in the heart - a steady ache, a dull burning, a swelling emptiness, not of loss, but of longing, of dreams yearning to be fulfilled. I've said goodbye so many times. Why am I always on this side of the screen? Someday, I will soar as my heart is pierced with fierce anticipation - no more anxious jealousy. Someday, I too will leap from within the wings of home and fly away. Someday, I will join the masses and follow in the direction my hand has so often waved. Finally free. Free to pursue, to watch, to dream, and to wonder.

Lead Me

"Lead me 

With strong hands.

Stand up when I can't.

Don't leave me 

Hungry for love,

Chasing dreams.

What about us?

Show me

You're willing to fight,

That I'm still the love of your life.

I know we call this our home

But I still feel alone."

- Sanctus Real -

Infinite

"I don't know if I will have the time to write anymore letters because I might be too busy trying to participate. So if this does end up being the last letter I just want you to know that I was in a bad place before I started high school and you helped me. Even if you didn't know what I was talking about or know someone who has gone through it, you made me not feel alone. Because I know there are people who say all these things don't happen. And there are people who forget what it's like to be 16 when they turn 17. I know these will all be stories someday. And our pictures will become old photographs. We'll all become somebody's mom or dad. But right now these moments are not stories. This is happening, I am here and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you're not a sad story. You are alive, and you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you're listening to that song and that drive with the people you love most in this world. And in this moment I swear, we are infinite."

- The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Perception

"Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we're nothing?"

"We accept the love we think we deserve."

Wishes

Mother & Kitten

It's Time

So this is what you meant
When you said that you were spent
And now it's time to build from the bottom of the pit
Right to the top
Don't hold back
Packing my bags and giving the academy a rain check

I don't ever wanna let you down
I don't ever wanna leave this town
'Cause after all
This city never sleeps at night

It's time to begin, isn't it?
I get a little bit bigger, but then I'll admit
I'm just the same as I was
Now don't you understand
That I'm never changing who I am

So this is where you fell
And I am left to sell
The path to heaven runs through miles of clouded hell
Right to the top
Don't look back
Turning the rags and giving the commodities a rain check

I don't ever wanna let you down
I don't ever wanna leave this town
'Cause after all
This city never sleeps at night

It's time to begin, isn't it?
I get a little bit bigger, but then I'll admit
I'm just the same as I was
Now don't you understand
That I'm never changing who I am

This road never looked so lonely
This house doesn't burn down slowly
To ashes, to ashes

It's time to begin, isn't it?
I get a little bit bigger, but then I'll admit
I'm just the same as I was
Now don't you understand
That I'm never changing who I am

- Imagine Dragons

A Life Lesson

"I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately. I'm tired of looking 'round rooms wondering what I've got to do or who I'm supposed to be. I don't want to be anything other than me."

The Simple Joy...of a Ball

Seeking Immortality

"Let us call the gesture of Bettina and Laura the gesture of longing for immortality. Bettina, who aspires to grand immortality, wishes to say: I refuse to die with this day and its cares, I wish to transcend myself, to be a part of history, because history is eternal memory. Laura, though she only aspires to small immortality, wants the same: to transcend herself and the unhappy moment in which she lives to do ‘something’ to make everyone who has known her remember her." 

- Milan Kundera in Immortality

Balance

"Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal." 

- Doyle in "John Bull's 'Other Island'"

Dreaming into Despair

A scene from "John Bull's 'Other Island'"

No, no: the climate is different. Here, if the life is dull, you can be dull too, and no great harm done. [Going off into a passionate dream] But your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! [Savagely] No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and [bitterly, at Broadbent] be "agreeable to strangers," like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. [Gabbling at Broadbent across the table] It's all dreaming, all imagination. He can't be religious. The inspired Churchman that teaches him the sanctity of life and the importance of conduct is sent away empty; while the poor village priest that gives him a miracle or a sentimental story of a saint, has cathedrals built for him out of the pennies of the poor. He can't be intelligently political, he dreams of what the Shan Van Vocht said in ninety-eight. If you want to interest him in Ireland you've got to call the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan and pretend she's a little old woman. It saves thinking. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination's such a torture that you can't bear it without whisky. [With fierce shivering self-contempt] At last you get that you can bear nothing real at all: you'd rather starve than cook a meal; you'd rather go shabby and dirty than set your mind to take care of your clothes and wash yourself; you nag and squabble at home because your wife isn't an angel, and she despises you because you're not a hero; and you hate the whole lot round you because they're only poor slovenly useless devils like yourself. [Dropping his voice like a man making some shameful confidence] And all the while there goes on a horrible, senseless, mischievous laughter. When you're young, you exchange drinks with other young men; and you exchange vile stories with them; and as you're too futile to be able to help or cheer them, you chaff and sneer and taunt them for not doing the things you daren't do yourself. And all the time you laugh, laugh, laugh! eternal derision, eternal envy, eternal folly, eternal fouling and staining and degrading, until, when you come at last to a country where men take a question seriously and give a serious answer to it, you deride them for having no sense of humor, and plume yourself on your own worthlessness as if it made you better than them.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3612/3612-h/3612-h.htm

Smile!

Immortality

"She walked around the pool toward the exit. She passed the lifeguard, and after she had gone some three or four steps beyond him, she turned her head, smiled, and waved to him. At that instant I felt a pang in my heart! That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover. That smile and that gesture had charm and elegance, while the face and the body no longer had any charm. It was the charm of a gesture drowning in the charmlessness of the body. But the woman, though she must of course have realized that she was no longer beautiful, forgot that for the moment. There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. In any case, the instant she turned, smiled, and waved to the young lifeguard (who couldn’t control himself and burst out laughing), she was unaware of her age. The essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me. I was strangely moved. And then the word Agnes entered my mind. Agnes. I had never known a woman by that name."

- Immortality by Milan Kundera -

Just Because...

Live Each Moment

For the Future

"I made my health a priority. I get at least 8 hours of sleep, eat home cooked meals, exercise regularly and removed stressors from my life. I allow myself time to relax in the morning before work and take a break in the afternoon. Yes, I sacrificed some old hobbies, but I'm better off now."
- a wiser person than I

Of the Soul and the Mind

Grace

“There is someone that I love even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is……me.”

- C.S. Lewis

Why is it that we have so much trouble extending the same grace to others that we allow ourselves everyday? Why is it that we can judge others brutally, without question, without grace, but we can come up with every excuse and justification for our own behavior? Realize that no one is perfect - certainly not yourself and no one else either. Then, learn to extend the forgiveness and grace to others that you would hope for yourself if anyone ever knew you as you truly are in your deepest core.

Elsewhere

"I love the time and in between
The calm inside me
In this space where I can breathe.
I believe there is a distance I have wandered
To touch upon the years,
Reaching out and reaching in,
Holding out holding in.

I believe 
This is heaven to no one else but me
And I'll defend it long as I can be left here to linger in silence.
If I chose to, would you try to understand?

Oh, the quiet child awaits the day when she can break free
The mold that clings like desperation.
Oh, mother don't you see I've got
To live my life the way I feel is right for me?
Say it's not right for you 
But it's right for me.

I believe 
This is heaven to no one else but me
And I'll defend it long as I can be left here to linger in silence.
If I chose to, would you try to understand?"

Fall

“Sometimes I wish for falling
Wish for the release
Wish for falling through the air
To give me some relief
Because falling's not the problem
When I'm falling I'm in peace
It's only when I hit the ground
It causes all the grief” 
- Florence Welch

Those highest of all beverages

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. 

Coffee in England is just toasted milk. 

Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.

Beauty as seen through the eyes of reality

Bad Day Bandage

If you are like me and love animals more than most humans, you will love this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/aww/

Though I generally do not post links on my blog, I feel that this one is justified, because it shows so many of the things that are beautiful and wonderful in life. In my opinion, of course.

Daydream

The moment when surroundings fade

When all that is tangible becomes a mist

A vision out of the corner of the eye

Less real than the pounding of your heart

The moment when overwhelming feeling

Overpowers, obliterates, erases fear

Consciousness forsaken in favor of

A world no more than feeling forever

The moment when forgetfulness overrides

Rushing sands of time and gives freedom

Freedom to indulge in feeling an idea

Feeling all there is to feel in a lifetime

The moment when time seems to stop

Lost in a mist of thought and imagining

Smiling, crying, unfeeling of effect

Lost for a moment in the mind

Free