The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.
—Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
Quotes
My Heart Leaps Up
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. The key is to never stop doing right.
—Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
The act of singing gives the most mundane words and phrases reverence and glory. You can make a shrine out of anything.
—Florence Welch, Useless Magic
In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
—Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
No Man Is an Island
by John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Stupid people are dangerous.
—Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women.
–Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
A Coney Island of the Mind, 13
Not like Dante
discovering a commedia
upon the slopes of heaven
I would paint a different kind
of Paradiso
in which the people would be naked
as they always are
in scenes like that
because it is supposed to be
a painting of their souls
but there would be no anxious angels telling them
how heaven is
the perfect picture of
a monarchy
and there would be no fires burning
in the hellish holes below
in which I might have stepped
nor any altars in the sky except
fountains of imagination
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
That Book Broad 