words to live by // 06.15.15

Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost. | Kahil Gibran

Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others. | Eleanor Roosevelt 

What wonderful thing didn't start out scary? | Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies 

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. | Rainer Maria Rilke 

We don't learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you. | Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites--day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. | Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

One hears it a lot on airplanes: "Make sure you have your own mask on, before helping others with theirs." | Lemony Snicket, on what is the best life advice

words to live by // Her, Her, Her

image by Jessica Rose

"She is a year ago.
She is the ache in the empty,
the first time you changed your mind
and the last time you were sorry about it.
She is a city sleeping beside you,
warm and vast and familiar, streetlights
yawning and stretching,
and you have never. You have never.
You have never loved someone like this.
She is your first stomach ache.
Your first panic attack and your
favorite cold shower.
A mountain is moving somewhere
inside of you, and her handprints are all over it.
Here. Here. Here, you love her.
In the fractured morning, full of
too tired and too sad, she is the first
foot that leaves the bed.
She is the fight in you, the winning 
and the losing battle
floating like a shipwreck in your chest.
When they ask you what your favorite moment is, 
You will say Her. 
You will always say Her."

Caitlyn Siehl, Her, Her, Her

words to live by // 04.28.15

Earth Day // 04.22.15

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.  Andy Warhol

words to live by // 04.07.15

The flower doesn't dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes. | Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant. | Vera Nazarian

You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair. | Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons 

Of course I'll hurt you. Of course you'll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence means accepting the risk of absence. | The Little Prince

Tell me Atlas, what is heavier? The world? Or its peoples' hearts? | Darshana S, Atlas Still Stands, But Does Anyone Else?

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. | Claude Monet 

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe. | Isaac Asimov 

And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on. | Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage