Maneet

“strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“The Sniper Bird by Stewart Stafford

"Look out!" the crowd shouted to me,
"There's a Sniper Bird in those trees!"
A whooshing sound shot past my ears,
Making me duck down to my knees.

He must have gone rogue, I reckoned,
Someone cheated him over birdseed,
Then he took a squirrel as his hostage,
Get a negotiator quickly up those trees.

He threw up his wings and surrendered,
They brought him down in a gilded cage,
Never again sniping at innocent people,
He studies elocution with a parrot sage.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The mistake most of us make is that we build our homes in other people in the hope that they will deem us worthy of being welcomed inside. We feel so abandoned and empty when people leave, because we’ve invested so much of ourselves in them.”
― Najwa Zebian, Welcome Home: A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul

“He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land