Emily

“We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Poem in a Straight Line:"

I never knew a soul who ever took a licking. My friends have all been champions at everything. And I, so often vulgar, so often obscene, so often vile, I, so deliberately parasitical, Unforgivably filthy, I, so often without patience to take a bath, I, who’ve been so ridiculous, so absurd, Tripping up in public on the carpet of etiquette, I, so grotesque and mean, submissive and insolent, Who’ve been insulted and not said a word, And when putting a word in growing still more ridiculous, I who strike chambermaids as laughable, I who feel porters wink sarcastically, I who’ve been scandalous about money, borrowing and not paying it back, I, who when the time came to fight, ducked As far as I could out of punching range, I who go into a sweat over the slightest thing — I’m convinced no one’s better than I at this sort of game. No one I know, none of my speaking acquaintances, Ever acted ridiculous, ever took insults, Was ever anything but noble – yes, all of them princes, living their lives… How I’d love to hear a human voice, from any one of them. Confessing not to sins but to infamies, Speaking not of violent but of cowardly acts! But no, each one’s a Paragon, to hear them tell it. Is there no one in this world who’d confess to me he’s been vile just once? All you princes, my brothers, Enough – I’m fed up with demigods! Where are the real people in this world? Am I the only scoundrel and bungler alive? Maybe women don’t always fall for them. Maybe they’ve been betrayed. But ridiculous? Never! And I, who’ve been ridiculous but never betrayed, How do I speak to their Highnesses without stammering? I, who’ve been vile, literally vile, Vile in the meanest and rottenest possible sense of the word”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

“Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.”
― Tiziano Terzani, A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

“When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall?
Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?
Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of
conditions in which all vital organic elemental events occur. And the botanist who says that the apple feel because the cellular tissue decays and so forth, is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says that the apple fell he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction...
In historic events the so-called great men are labels
giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace