Liv

“I spent so much time
creating versions of myself
that were far from the truth,
characters i would perform
depending on who i was around

layers that could hide
the inner dance of turmoil,
between my lack of confidence,
the pain i did not understand,
and the uneasiness that comes with reaching out to others for the
love that i was not giving myself

(before the healing)”
― Yung Pueblo, Inward

“You wouldn't plant a seed and then dig it up every few minutes to see if it has grown. So why do you keep questioning yourself, your hard work and your decisions? Have patience ... and keep watering your seeds.”
― Steven Bartlett

“Like the shore changing with the swing of the tides, I seem to be uncovering long-hidden propensities, dormant aspects of myself newly exposed by the pull of the moon. For here I am when the tide goes out - speeder slowing down, fighter finding harmony, activist turned contemplative, analyzer seeking synthesis, communard become solitaire, rationalist grown spiritual, teacher turned student, desire dissolving in contentment.”
― Alix Kates Shulman, Drinking the Rain: A Memoir

“It is said that in those days one could hear seventy languages in the streets of Istanbul. The vast Ottoman Empire, shrunken and weakened though it now was, had made it normal and natural for Greeks to inhabit Egypt, Persians to settle in Arabia and Albanians to live with Slavs. Christians and Muslims of all sects, Alevis, Zoroastrians, Jews, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, subsisted side by side in the most improbable places and combinations. There were Muslim Greeks, Catholic Armenians, Arab Christians and Serbian Jews. Istanbul was the hub of this broken-felloed wheel, and there could be found epitomised the fantastical bedlam and babel, which although no one realised it at the time, was destined to be the model and precursor of all the world's great metropoles a hundred years hence, by which time Istanbul itself would, paradoxically, have lost its cosmopolitan brilliance entirely. It would be destined, perhaps, one day to find it again, if only the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted, might finally be toppled in the century to come.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings