Diana

“There is so much I won’t ever know. I will never know how Edith Lieber Vonnegut felt when she watched from her kitchen window as this tree dropped all its leaves in one furious afternoon. I will never know the inside of your life, what you’ve survived to reach this now. I will never know what it’s like to live as a tree, growing up into the light and down into the soil. But I know the thrill I feel beneath the ginkgo tree, how looking up at it makes me feel an awe that contains both wonder and fear at its edges, and thanks to the generosity of my neighbor, I know that I am unalone in this thrill.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

“I’ve spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my solar plexus that my life isn’t for anything, that it doesn’t mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of the ginkgo tree, I’m able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here—that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

“People are just dying everywhere, all the time, every which way. What can the rest of us do but hold on for dear life.”
― Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life: A Memoir

“but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.”
― Annie Dillard, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New