spark

"Fate is nothing more than a person's outlook on life."   "No matter where I lived, my life would be the same. I'd be living the same mundane life and no one would be interested in me. I felt like if I lived like this for too long, I'd shrivel up and die. That's why I invented you. You, who I'll meet someday. To you at least I wouldn't be that ordinary, right?"   "I'm not unhappy but I'm not happy either."    "Try having a kid. You'll feel full without eating. Every day will be amazing. You'll be invincible. No one can beat you. No one can beat parents."    "I think I feel a compulsion to live a productive day, but there's not much to show for it. I'm just constantly looking at my watch and being chased by time. As soon as I realised I've been living like that my whole life, weirdly, my heart suddenly started to pound."    "Do not give advice. Do not try to comfort. Those are the ...

"But books were different. They had lots of blanks. Blanks between words and even between lines. I could squeeze myself in there and sit, or walk, or scribble down my thoughts. It didn't matter if I had no idea what the words meant." "But books are quiet. They remain dead silent until somebody flips open a page. Only then do they spill out their stories, calmly and thoroughly, just enough at a time for me to handle." "What does love mean?" "To discover beauty." "I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to judge you, I just wanted to know your purpose. Your purpose for running." Dora let out a sigh. "To me, that's like being asked, Why do you live? Do you live for any purpose? Let's be honest, we just live because we're alive." "Maybe understanding a language is like understanding the expressions and emotions of other people." "Old books seem all right, though. They have a richer scent that's more a...

"Life was very different when you walked through it."   "Now that he accepted the slowness of himself, he took pleasure in the distance he covered."   "Maybe you saw even more than the land when you got out of the car and used your feet."    "Walking the road already travelled was even harder. It was like not moving at all. It was worse; like eating into a part of himself."   "It was hard to understand a little and then walk away."    "Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways."    He needed the very famous actor to know that you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way." -- Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Norman Rockwell, Marriage License, 1955, oil on canvas, 45.5 x 42.5 inches http://www.nrm.org/images/mobile-app/ml/ml_d-Steph.html  

THE MORE LOVING ONE by W.H. Auden Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. -- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself. ˜ Another short fit of abstraction followed, when, shaking it off, she thus attacked her companion. ˜ [...] formed such a contrast with his early opinion on the subject [...] as time is for ever producing between the plans and decisions of mortals, for their own instruction, and their neighbours' entertainment. -- Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

The sun was sharp; I was sweating in my woman-travelling-alone modest outfit. ˜ Real life has such a hard time learning poetry. -- Githa Hariharan, Almost Home

Oh. if life were made of moments, Even now and then a bad one! But if life were only moments, Then you'd never know you had one. [...] Let the moment go... Don't forget it for a moment, though. Just remembering you've had an "and", When you're back to "or", Makes the "or" mean more Than it did before. Now I understand. ~ "Moments in the Woods", Into the Woods

Servant: [...] I pray, sir, can you read? Romeo: Ay, mine own fortune in my misery. -- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

"Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurence; but misfortune in general is the rule." "...the negativity of well-being and happiness, in antithesis to the positivity of pain." "...the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes." "The scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful." "We shall do best to think of life as a desengano, as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce." "People who pass their lives in reading and acquire their wisdom from books are like those who learn about a country from travel descriptions: they can impart information about a great number of things, but at bottom they possess no collected, ...

"I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together." "It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural." "...it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague." -- Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

From A Little Book of Happiness compiled by Ruskin Bond, The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony. -- V.S. Pritchett Happiness is not waiting to be found; there's no use looking for it. All we need to do is find the barriers within ourselves that we have built against it. Trust -- in people, in life -- is a good way to begin. We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. -- E.M. Forster Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another. -- Jerome K. Jerome The adventure is not in arriving, it's in the on-the-way experience. It is not in the expected; it's in the surprise. You are not choosing what you shall see in the world, but giving the world an even chance to see you, to get to know you, and, perhaps, show you just the things you had longed to see but could never find. Sometimes, when all else fails, a sense of humour comes to the...

You attract what you are ready for. -- Which do you want: the pain of staying where you are or the pain of growth? -- Judith Hanson Lasater

Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars. Every nigger you see got a kingdom in his head. -- Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece, after all." —Nathan W. Morris

"What will survive of us is love." - Philip Larkin, 'An Arundel Tomb'

"the weight of too much liberty" - William Wordsworth, Nuns Fret Not

"The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time." - David Bowie