Nick Bickel

“we could not pray for
anything any more, because we would feel that He always knows of
something better.”
― Johanna Spyri, Heidi

“Tomorrow is just as real a thing as yesterday. So is day after next, and the rest of them. Because you cannot see the future, it does not follow that it is not there. Your own path may vary widely, but the piece of country you are to travel is solid and real.
We have been most erroneously taught not to think of the future; to live only in the present: and at the same time we have been taught to guide our lives by an ideal of the remotest possible future - a postmortem eternity.
Between the contradictory ideals of this paradox, most of us drag along, forced by the exigencies of business to consider some future, but ignoring most of it. A single human life is short enough to be well within range of anybody's mind. Allow for it eighty years: if you don't have eight you are that much in - so much less to plan for.
Sit down wherever you happen to be; under twenty, over fifty, anywhere on the road; lift your eyes from your footsteps, and "look before and after."
Look back, see the remarkable wiggling sort of path you have made; see the places where you made no progress at all, but simply tramped up and down without taking a step. Ask yourself: "If I had thought about what I should be feeling toady, would I have behaved as I did then?" Quite probably not.
But why not? Why not, in deciding on own's path and gait at a given moment, consider that inevitable advancing future? Come it will; but how it comes, what it is, depends on us.
Then look ahead; not merely just before your nose, but way ahead. It is a good and wholesome thing to plan out one's whole life; as one thinks it is likely to be; as one desires it should be; and then act accordingly. Suppose you are about twenty-five. Consider a number of persons of fifty or sixty, and how they look.
Do you want to look like that? What sort of a body do you want at fifty?
It is in your hands to make. In health, in character, in business, in friendship, in love, in happiness; your future is very largely yours to make.
Then why not make it?
Suppose you are thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. So long as you have a year before you it is worth while to consider it in advance.
Live as a whole, not in disconnected fractions.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“You're not a Quaker, Jeremy. I happen to know you put beer on your cornflakes.”
― Kyle Keyes, Matching Configurations

“His thoughts went to Kismaayo, and lately, particularly of Abdi. If there were a hero in this story, it was Abdi. Jon thought, this young man from Maine had left that war weary husk of a country called Somalia and had come to these United States of America to pursue the dream of happiness, security, and hope.”
― Mike Bennett, Las Vegas on Twelve Dollars a Day