Emily

“And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Sometimes life feels a certain way that we call “absurd”: nothing matters, all efforts are for naught, everything seems random and perverse, positive intention is perpetually thwarted. This stance communicates darkness and edginess, which can feel like wisdom. But we don’t live as if life is absurd; we live as if it has meaning and makes sense. We live (or try to) by kindness, loyalty, friendship, aspiration to improvement, believing the best of other people. We assume causality and continuity of logic. And we find, through living, that our actions do matter, very much. We can be a good parent or a bad parent, we can drive safely or like a maniac. Our minds can feel clean and positive and clear or polluted and negative. To have an ambition and pursue it feels healthy. A life without earnest striving is a nightmare. (When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.)”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“We tend, today, to want to have a road map of exactly where we are going. We want to know whether or not we have succeeded in everything we do. It’s all right to want to know—we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t—but we also have to understand that a lot of the time we aren’t going to know.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet