“We have taken many paths we would not have chosen, and we have done many jobs we did not want to do. We have carried burdens we did not want to carry and dealt with impossible people we did not like. It is strange that the road we did not want to take is the one that brought us more quickly to the place we wanted to be. At times, the waywas hostile, but when we needed a hand there was one. When we needed courage, it was there. What we call problems and unjust circumstances have away of teaching us integrity and how to be peaceful. It makes us wonder how many other rewards we have missed because we resisted something that looked like too much responsibility.”
― Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations (Cherokee Feast of Days
― Cherokee Feast of Days: Daily Meditations (Cherokee Feast of Days
“This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.”
― The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
― The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
“Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a 'hot mess' or having 'too many issues' are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.”
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“Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you don’t know you’re having one until you’re right in the middle of it.”
― Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
― Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
“He asked what I made of the other students, so I told him. They were OK, but they were all very similar; they struggled to have different opinions because they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn’t most people’s experience of life. He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken-processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. He laughed and thought this tremendously witty. It wasn’t meant to be funny.”
― The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
― The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
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