Viktor Frankl

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Grief Astronomer by Andrea Gibson

A difficult life is not less

worth living than a gentle one.

Joy is simply easier to carry

than sorrow. And your heart

could lift a city from how long

you’ve spent holding what’s been 

nearly impossible to hold

This world needs those 

who know how to do that. 

Those who can find a tunnel 

that has no light at the end of it 

and hold it up like a telescope 

to know the darkness 

also contains truths that could 

bring the light into its knees.

Grief astronomer, adjust the lens,

Look close, tell us what you see.

Cartography for Beginners

by Emily Hasler (an excerpt) -

Take a little license with rivers, especially their curves and estuaries. Add an oxbow lake if at all possible. If the area you are mapping has no seas/lakes/rivers/streams, I have to question why you are bothering. 

Ingrid Goff-Maidoff

God spoke today in flowers,
and I, who was waiting on words,
almost missed the conversation.

I who have never known men - Jacqueline Harpmen

As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. 

Arundhati Roy - Mother Mary Comes to Me

I sold a ring, the only piece of jewellery I owned to a man at a fruit juice stall. He gave me a few hundred rupees and a banana shake. Enough for my passage to Delhi. 

—

I think I had a cool seraphy watching over me. Especially each time I was at a crossroads and had to make a decision. My education, the class I came from, and, above all, the fact that I spoke English protected me and gave me options that millions of others did not have. 

—

It was not any great strength of character or steely artistic ambition that saved me from prison or serious harm. It was just happenstance, and a series of small impulsive decisions, taken on the fly. 

A joke from the old country

A joke from the old country:

Two men are sitting at a bar. The first asks, "Where are you from?"

"I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire," says the second, "educated in Czechoslovakia, started my working life in Hungary, did a stint in Nazi Germany, then got married, had kids and raised my family in the Soviet Union."

The first man shakes his head. "You must have travelled a great deal."

"In fact," says the second. "I never left my village."

Venice is a human city

There are no cars. The canals are arteries, the streets are veins, and the people are the blood, the life force.