April 27, 2013
"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed."

— Ernest Hemingway

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April 16, 2013
"Barn’s burnt down—
now
I can see the moon."

— Mizuta Masahide, 1657–1723

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(Notes: 1)
  
April 16, 2013
"It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."

— John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

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April 16, 2013
"There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world."

— Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

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March 25, 2013
Well Water

What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up …” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

Randall Jarrell

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March 7, 2013
"Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."

— Barbara Kingsolver, The Future of Culture, Community, and Land

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January 19, 2013
"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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January 19, 2013
"Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that."

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

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January 19, 2013
"Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is."

— Victor Frankl

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January 11, 2013
"Could a greater miracle take place than to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?"

— Henry David Thoreau

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December 13, 2012
"Talent is universal; opportunity is not."

— Half the Sky Documentary

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November 26, 2012
"I would say that learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be anxious has learned the most important thing."

— Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

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October 31, 2012
"In my walks, everyone I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from them."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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October 25, 2012
"There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity. There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity. There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love."

— St. Bernard of Clairvaux, care of Jordan Konkol

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October 13, 2012
"I think we can push this further and say that when we claim the right to be respected - when we claim our “human rights,” in fact - we are not just asserting that somewhere in us there is something making imperative demands. We are trying to affirm a proper place in relation with others. We are trying to affirm that we are embedded in relationship. I am and have value because I am seen by and engaged with love - ideally, the love we experience humanly and socially, but beyond and behind that always and unconditionally the love of God. And the service of others’ rights or dignity is simply the search to echo this permanent attitude of love, attention, respect, which the creator gives to what is made."

— Rowan Williams

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