Amanda

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but 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, Letters to a Young Poet

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what the books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury

“In the bitter waves of woe, 
Beaten and tossed about 
By the sullen winds that blow 
From the desolate shores of doubt,­­ 

When the anchors that faith had cast 
Are dragging in the gale, 
I am quietly holding fast 
To the things that cannot fail: 

In the darkest night of the year, 
When the stars have all gone out,  That courage is better than fear,  That faith is truer than doubt; 

And fierce though the fiends may fight,  And long though the angels hide, 
I know that Truth and Right 
Have the universe on their side; 

And somewhere, beyond the stars, 
Is a Love that is better than fate; 
When the night unlocks her bars 
I shall see Him, and I will wait”
― Washington Gladden

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language