Jan C

“She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture.”
― Don DeLillo

“I Read by Stephen Sondheim from "Passion"

Fosca:

I do not read to think. I do not read to learn.
I do not read to search for truth
I know the truth, the truth is hardly what I need.
I read to dream.

I read to live. In other people's lives.
I read about the joys, the world
Dispenses to the fortunate,
And listen for the echoes.

I read to live,
To get away from life!

No, captain, I have no illusions.
I recognize the limits of my dreams.
I know how painful dreams can be
Unless you know they're merely dreams.

There is a flower which offers nectar at the top,
Delicious nectar at the top and bitter poison underneath.
The butterfly that stays too long and drinks too deep
Is doomed to die.

I read to fly, to skim -
I do not read to swim.
I do not dwell on dreams.
I know how soon a dream becomes an expectation
How can I have expectations?
Look at me.
No, captain, look at me -
Look at me!
I do not hope for what I cannot have!
I do not cling to things I cannot keep!
The more you cling to things, the more you love them,
The more the pain you suffer when they're taken from you...
Ah, but if you have no expectations,
You can never have a disappointment.”
― Stephen Sondheim, Passion

“I do have a phone in New York. One night—at one in the morning!—I was awakened by Miss Bette Davis, the actress, calling from California to tell me how much she admired something of mine. She had no idea that it was anything later than ten o’clock at night where I was. “I don’t mind that, but in March, just before I left, the phone rang and a voice said: ‘We are going to castrate you and then kill you.’ All I could say to that was: ‘I think you have the wrong number.’ I’m quite sure he did.…”
― Alan Levy, W. H. Auden: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety

“Be an encourager. Scatter sunshine. Who knows whose life you might touch with something as simple as a kind word.”
― Debbie Macomber