Tom Stone

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything