Jason Oliver

“Scars bear testimony to occupation, to event, but not to circumstances; to phenomena but not conditions. They are evidence only, not details. In which direction was he walking? Were the soles of his boots intact? Was the knife fresh-sharpened? What did he witness? I want to know more than the fact that my grandfather was in the Altamaha floodplain in 1928... Scars turn into trinkets you keep.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“The kind of hope that I often think about...I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation...[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Vaclav Havel”
― fritjof capra, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

“There is no virtue in advertising one’s sadness. But there is no wisdom in denying it either. And there is the beautiful possibility that great love can grow out of sadness if it is well-tended. Sadness can make us bitter or wise. We get to choose.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

“Maybe not. But maybe yes. Ellen, the older I get, the more convinced I am that every hurt the world has ever known is somehow the fault of every person who ever lived. Maybe not directly and never entirely, but somehow, I fear, we own all of the world’s hurts together.”
― Allen Levi, Theo of Golden