“Friends– like flowers– give pleasure just by being.”
~ Rebecca Shaw
“I am the captain of my soul.”
~ William Ernst Henry
“death is coming for now; but life, a life that is inspiring and amazing and whole, is coming after. you & i were made for this. we were made to live life to the fullest. we are more than strong enough to face death and pain and suffering head on, and to dance through life anyway. we were made to be exactly who we are, and to use our lives for good.”
Liz, at just be. love all. live life
“If someone breaks your heart just punch them in the face. Seriously. Punch them in the face and go get some ice cream.”
~ Frank Ocean
“The love, the acceptance of other persons makes me into the unique person I am meant to be.”
~ Peter G. van Breemen, S.J.
“Never Forget Who You Are Because It’s Like Forgetting Water is Wet, The Sun Is Bright, Snow is Cold. It’s Redundant.”
~ Andrew Fukuda, The Hunt
“I’d discovered that the sun equated happiness. Its bright and lovely existence was hope incarnate. It exposed the dark, brought forth the light and showed you that no matter how strong or oppressive the night was, that it was infinitely stronger, exponentially more substantial and just because you couldn’t see it with your eyes, didn’t mean it wasn’t still with you. it was stalwart and constant. It was infinite.”
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Body-shaming is ubiquitous and abhorrent; it happens everywhere, to pretty much everyone, at one time or another. Fat-shaming is a specific variety of body-shaming. It is not the only kind of shaming that takes place, but it is one of the more common ones. Lots of folks think fat-shaming is perfectly acceptable. More than that, lots of folks think fat-shaming is actually a good thing, because with shame as a motivator, perhaps those darn fat people will stop being so fat. It doesn’t work, though — shame is not a catalyst for change; it is a paralytic. Anyone who has ever carried extreme personal shame knows this. Shame doesn’t make you stronger, nor does it help you to grow, or to be healthy, or to be sane.
~ Fat Heffalump, The Burden of Hate
You are not worth less because you eat more; and you are not worth more because you eat less.
– Shinji Moon
May
It is not for nothing that the word has remained man’s principal toy and tool;
without the meaning and value it sustains, all man’s other tools would be worthless.
~ Lewis Mumford
Words are things and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that
which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
~ George Gordon Byron
and flame and flight and flower
steel, stitch, cloud and clout,
and drumbeats on the air.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks
“Hold a book in your hand and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.”
~ Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
“Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.”
~ William Feather
“The worth of a book is to be measured
by what you can carry away from it.”
James Bryce
“Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.”
~ Charles Caleb Colton
“My best friend is a person who will get me a book I have not read.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
“School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page.”
~ Kinsey, T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton
— Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.
~ Francis Bacon
“Libraries are not in the real world, after all. They are places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought.”
~ Paul Auster, Moon Palace
“In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
.
“A house that has a library in it has a soul.”
~ Plato
“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
~ Thomas Carlyle
*”Books are the carriers of civilization… They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
~ Barbara W. Tuchman
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
~ C.S. Lewis
*Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.”
~ Thomas Berger
“You know you’re a bibliophile (lover of books) when you still get upset thinking about the burning of the library of Alexandria.”
~ Kate
“She is too fond of books and it has turned her mind.”
~ Louisa May Alcott
“A penny for your thoughts. Five bucks if they are about books.”
~ Unknown
“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”
~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“Big’ is an adjective most of us learn early on is something you never, ever want to be called. It’s the opposite of being contained and in control. And in a culture that only puts very, very thin women on screens and in ads, big equals un-special, unworthy of attention, unseen.
After a lot of years of thinking about how much being “big” scared me, I realized the thing I feared the most wasn’t my own physical size, it was the huge, seeping, unnamed emptiness that no one sees. That was the mass I was really trying to shrink or fill through various eating behaviors. I think of it as a black hole located somewhere in my stomach/chest region, the center of my body. It’s freezing, ugly, abandoned, condemned, and for a long time I believed that emptiness would always be my starting point, where I was from.
But then on an ordinary afternoon when I was wondering for the nth time how I’ve let that emptiness motivate so much of my behavior throughout my life, a different explanation occurred to me. What if the cavity inside could be a place, not an emptiness? What if it was light and inhabitable? What if all along the space I’d been trying to fill and not feel was somewhere I wanted to live? And what if that space inside made me bigger than this war I’ve waged against myself as long as I remember, with food always my weapon of choice?”
~ Margaret Wheeler Johnson
“How much you eat at a single meal has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you’re a good friend, daughter, mother, sister, aunt, thinker, worker, citizen or overall human. Nothing you consume will ever diminish how valuable you are in those areas that count so much more.”
~ Margaret Wheeler Johnson
“Little drops of water wear down big stones.”
“So use your voice and speak your truth. Stand tall and refuse to let anyone keep you silent. Your feelings are important and they matter. Always.”
Daniell Koepki
“The place I grew up was a grey unfeeling nothing. Then one day I heard your voice [singing] and I knew for the first time that there was beauty in the world.”
~ Endeavor Morse, Endeavor, S1E1 Pilot
“Be David [of David and Goliath]. Why not?!”
~ Jon Stewart, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, October 22, 2013, S19 E10
“This may shock you, but the most important person in your life is you. You are meant to be ‘full of yourself.”
~ Alexandra Stoddard, Things I Want My Daughters to Know
Explaining her life choice after failing at law school while excelling at baking and acquiring 27 study partners.
“I just figured if I was going to make the world a better place; I was going to do it with cookies.”
~ Miss Pascale, Stranger Than Fiction
“I see you as incredibly brave and strong. You rescued yourself from that house. You didn’t need a hero. You are one.”
~Anders, Lynsay Sands, Immortal Ever After
“The soul is healed by being with children.”
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am here, come closer,” the old donkey said with her eyes. “I will mother you.”
“You are the one that you are looking for.”
~ Audre Lorde
“The seed knew that in order to grow it needed to be dropped in dirt, covered by darkness, and struggle to reach the light.”
~ Unknown
“In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature.”
~ Edna O’Brien
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet drink and botanical medicine.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“One way of celebrating the Solstice is to consider it a sacred time of reflection, release, restoration, and renewal.”
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy
“There are two ways of spreading light; to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Edith Wharton
“It doesn’t really matter whether we reflect the light through our authentic gifts or whether our authentic calling is to spread it. What matters is that tonight is that the world is dark, cold, and bleak. Your flame burns so brightly. Share your Love and warmth with others. Watch the Light return.”
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy
“Some holiday traditions are sacred. In our house one such tradition is the annual Christmas classic cinema celebration.”
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: The Daybook of Comfort and Joy
“One of the things that Christmas reminds us is that Jesus Christ was once a child.”
~ Hark Herald Sarmiento
“How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, His precepts!”
~ Benjamin Franklin
“Now let us welcome the New Year full of things that have never been.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
“I dwell in possibilities .”
~ Emily Dickinson
“And what does January hold? Clean account books. Bare diaries. Three hundred and sixty-five new days, neatly parceled into weeks, months, seasons. A chunk of time, of life… those few first notes like an orchestra tuning up before the play begins.”
~ Phyllis Nicholson, Country Bouquet
“So burrow in. Snuggle deep. A winter idyll of simple splendor awaits.”
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach, Romancing the Ordinary: A Year of Simple Splendor
“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”
~ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
When I told him that the cruel opinions of others expressed to me by others and society hurt me and mattered so much:
“Fuck them.”
~ my friend Daniel
“When you have learned something from the incident, it’s not a failure anymore.”
~ my brother Terry
“When I look in the mirror I see a unicorn. A badass unicorn.”
~ Unknown
“One thing I know is that each tiny step forward changes the whole world around you. Nothing is as it was before. And the next tiny step changes the world yet again. We don’t heal in a vacuum or static environment. It’s a living, breathing entity, this little bubble we live in.”
~ Granny, from the blog The Village Granny
“For each one of us, there is a desert to travel. A star to discover. And a being within ourselves to bring to life.”
~ Unknown
“Participation– that’s what’s gonna save the human race.”
~ Pete Seeger
“It doesn’t make sense to call ourselves ugly, because we don’t really see ourselves. We don’t watch ourselves sleeping in bed, curled up and silent with chests rising and falling with our own rhythm. We don’t see ourselves reading a book, eyes fluttering and glowing. You don’t see yourself looking at someone with love and care inside your heart. There’s no mirror in your way when you’re laughing and smiling and happiness is leaking out of you. You would know exactly how bright and beautiful you are if you saw yourself in the moments where you are truly yourself.”
~ dirty wings (via thatsgoldjerry)
“I treat myself like I would my daughter. I brush her hair, wash her laundry, tuck her in goodnight. Most importantly, I feed her. I do not punish her. I do not berate her, leave tears staining her face. I do not leave her alone. I know she deserves more.
I know I deserve more.”
~ Michelle K.
“If I’d had children and had a girl, the first words I would have taught her would have been “fuck off” because we weren’t brought up ever to say that to anyone, were we? And it’s quite valuable to have the courage and the confidence to say, “No, fuck off, leave me alone, thank you very much.”
– Dame Helen Mirren
“Self-admiration giveth much consolation.”
~ Gertrude Atherton
“The most powerful relationship you will ever have is the relationship with yourself.
~ Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“Loving yourself…does not mean being self-absorbed or narcissistic, or disregarding others. Rather it means welcoming yourself as the most honored guest in your own heart, a guest worthy of respect, a lovable companion.”
~ Margo Anand
“You alone are enough. You have nothing to prove to anybody.”
~ Maya Angelou
“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”
~ William Shakespeare, Henry V.
“Find the love you seek, by first finding the love within yourself. Learn to rest in that place within you that is your true home.”
~ Ravi Shankar
