Shirin

“Why don’t you turn on the dawnzer?” Ramona asked, proud of her new word.

Beezus looked up from her book. “What are you talking about?” she asked Ramona.

“What’s a dawnzer?”

Ramona was scornful. “Silly. Everybody knows what a dawnzer is.”

“I don’t,” said Mr. Quimby, who had been reading the evening paper. “What is a dawnzer?”

“A lamp,” said Ramona. “It gives a lee light. We sing about it every morning in kindergarten.”

A puzzled silence fell over the room until Beezus suddenly shouted with laughter.

“She-she means—” she gasped, “The Star-Spangled B-banner!” Her laughter dwindled to giggles. “She means the dawn’s early light.”
― Beverly Cleary, Ramona the Pest

“Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“Pepper’s given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees. Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant-y-Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent-trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune’s marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper’s mother returned to Pepper’s surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory