Steven Burleson

“As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”
― Audre Lorde

“A foreign couple came in just after Nicky. The woman asked, ‘So, this is a library?’ Me: No, it’s a bookshop. Woman: So does that mean people can just borrow the books? Me: No, the books are for sale. Woman: Do you buy the books? Can people just come with a book and give it to you and take another one away? [will to live seeping away rapidly] Woman: Do you sell these old ones over here, or are they just for display?”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller