Joy

“Maybe they were back to not talking. That's what she missed the most: talking. Serious, silly, bone-deep, flippant, all their words and thoughts like gifts to each other, the only gifts they, with their hobbled hearts, could give.”
― Julia Spencer-Fleming, I Shall Not Want

“I once heard an author describe writing as taking bits and pieces of her experiences and observations, then she questions, dissects, and analyzes them. She extrapolates from them, stretching the thought out. Then she adds from her imagination a big dose of what might have been, a good measure of what would never be, and spices it all with wishful thinking.”
― Laurie Brown, What Would Jane Austen Do?

“An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series