Embedded Files
not every cage is a prison, nor every loss eternal
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"Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed." --Abraham Joshua Heschel
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“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
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"... a hundred big wishes weren't worth one little fact..." --Joe Abercrombie
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semper ad astra
always to the stars
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milky chance
desert noises
love strange
coral bones
timber timbre
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"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." --Franz Kafka
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"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it." --Fahrenheit 451
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"A book is like a garden carried in the pocket." -Chinese proverb.
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"Reading can seriously damage your ignorance. You've been warned." --Tyson Adams
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"travel isn’t always pretty. you go away. you learn. you get scarred, marked, changed in the process. it even breaks your heart." - anthony bourdaine
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My blood is the oceans.
My bones are the stars.
My breath is the trees.
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“Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he’s been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old time rail journey… delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.” --The Ride, by Gordon B. Hinkley
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." --The Cross of Iron, General Dwight D. Eisenhower
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Alfred Lord Tennyson
Idylls of the King
The Passing of Arthur
'I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful?
Or else as if the world were wholly fair,
But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,
And have not power to see it as it is:
Perchance, because we see not to the close;--
For I, being simple, thought to work His will,
And have but stricken with the sword in vain;
And all whereon I leaned in wife and friend
Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm
Reels back into the beast, and is no more.
My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death;
Nay--God my Christ--I pass but shall not die.'
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"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“We shall not cease exploration and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know it for the first time." T.S. Elliot
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"All truth is one. In this light may science and religion labor here together for the steady evolution of mankind from darkness to light; from prejudice to tolerance; from narrowness to broadmindedness." --Cuthbert W. Pound, Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals:
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"In spite of the problems he was having, he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don’t or won’t or can’t, and plenty of them aren’t in prison, either." --Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King
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“We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow.”
--Braiding Sweetgrass, By Robin Wall Kimmerer
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"We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the Universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of Nature, a unique action of the total Universe." --Alan Watts
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SELECTIONS I WOULD LIKE TO MEMORIZE
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” --Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
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"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life." --John Muir
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"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." --John Muir
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"In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars… Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees." --John Muir
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“i’m fighting for life. Death is the enemy. The first enemy and the last. The enemy always wins. and we still need to buy them. That’s all I know. You and I won’t find much joy while we’re here. But we can keep others alive. We can defend those who can’t defend themselves.” John Snow, Game of Thrones
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“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof.” --V for Vendetta
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” --V for Vendetta
“Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch, we are free.” --V for Vendetta
“…artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.” --V for Vendetta
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If it falls your lot to be a streetsweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say here lived a great streetsweeper who swept his job well. --Martin Luther King
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"First they came for the Socialists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me." --Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)
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"Every time we sit we sit in such a way that the world will profit from our sitting. We are solid we are relaxed we are calm. We are happy while we sit. We sit like sitting on a lotus flower. Not a heap of burning charcoal." --Thich Nhat Han
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"And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil."
--Richard III, William Shakespeare
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Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
--T.S. Eliot
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Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I'll be there
Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."
--Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad
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"we are no more than a series of seconds" --Lauren Slater
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"But it ain't all buttons and charts, little albatross. You know what the first rule of flying is? Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a home." --Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly
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"My mythology should have guided me better" --Zorah
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Mary Oliver's instructions for living:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
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If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”
― Oscar Wilde
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“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
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