| on living | on travel | on love | on writing | on friendship |
"There is always something to do. There
are hungry people
to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people
to comfort and
make well, and while I don't expect you to
save the world,
I do think it's not too much to ask to love
those with whom
you sleep, share the happiness with those
who you call friends,
engage those among you who are visionary and
remove from your
life those who offer you depression, despair
and disrespect." --Nikki Giovanni
"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time,
and sometimes you weep." - Carl Sanburg
"When we walk to the edge of all the light we
have known and take a step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe
that one of two things will happen: there will be something solid for us
to stand on, or God will teach us to fly." - Soren Kierkegaard
"To be yourself in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to
make you anything else
is to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight, and never
stop fighting." -- e.e. cummings
"Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate
realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong.
Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now." -- Edward
Abbey
"Nothing is worth more than this day." -- Goethe
"i'd rather learn from one one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance." -- e.e. cummings
"You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories"
-- Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
"...in these six days
in Oregon I have learned: that I know what I want;
that I had forgotten how many stars there are;
that my life is open at one end. I have learned
I could come back here. I could find the way. And that
I can leave from here for anywhere in the world."
- Becky Birtha, Six Days in Oregon
"You have to keep us in mind, Tashi would say,
and we would laugh, because it is so easy to
forget Africa in America." - Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret
of Joy
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.
I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move;
to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come
down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe
granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. - Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne
"Roar and rumble, twist and turn, the sky ain't never as crazy as the
world.
Bound for glory? This train? Ha!
I wonder just where the hell we're bound. Rain on, little rain,
rain on!
Blow on, little wind, keep blowin'!
'Cause these guys is a singin that this train is bound for glory..."
-- Woody Guthrie
"There are landscapes in which we feel above us
not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed ...
our relationship with sky thins and loosens, while our connection to space
becomes as solid as a bone." -- Tom Robbins, Another Roadside
Attraction
"'Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebastian. "I
should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy,
and then when I was old and ugly and miserable I could come back and dig
it up and remember." -- Evelyn Waugh
"So we move on down the empty road. I don't want
to own these praries, or photograph them, or change them, or even stop
or even keep going. We are just moving down the empty road."
- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motoorcycle Maintenance
You didn't expect to fall in love, I said to myself
And at the same time I answered gently, do
you think so?
-- Leonard Cohen
For one human being to love another human being:
that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us,
the ultimate task, the final test and proof,
the work for which all other work is but preparation. --Rilke
We love the things
we love for what they are. -- Robert
Frost
Love does not consist in gazing at each other
but in looking outward together in the same direction. - Antoinne De St. Exupery
"We need in love to practice only this, letting each other go.
For holding on comes easily, we do not need to learn it." - Rilke
one thing i don't need
is any more apologies
i got sorry greetin me at my front door
you can keep yrs
i don't know what to do wit em
they don't open doors
or bring the sun back
they don't make me happy
or get a mornin paper
didn't nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars
cuz a sorry
...
i let sorry/didn't meanta/& how cd i know
abt that
take a walk down a dark & musty street in
brooklyn
i'm gonna do exactly what i want to
& i won't be sorry for none of it
letta sorry soothe yr soul/i'm gonna soothe mine.
-- ntzoke shange,
for
colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enough
Poetry is a kind of lying necessarily,
To profit the poet or beauty. -- Jack Gilbert
"Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved." --
Marge Piercy
It is not hard work which is dreary; it is superficial work.
- Edith Hamilton
"Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.
One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but
one cannot communicate and teach it." -- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship,
we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own." -- Charlotte Bronte
"To lose a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend, and if
I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups, who are no longer interested
in anything..." - The Little Prince
Forgetting someone is like
forgetting to turn off the light in the backyard
so it stays lit all the next day.
But then it's the light
that makes you remember." - Y. Armichai
*don't you think that every creative woman is a lover and a revolutionary? - nabaneeta dev sen*