Ruby

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“I am not, for all my frustration, opposed to capitalism. Most Americans, poor ones included, aren’t. We like the idea that anyone can succeed. What I am opposed to is the sort of capitalism that sucks the life out of a whole bunch of the citizenry and then demands that they do better with whatever they have left. If we could just agree that poor people are doing the necessary grunt work and that there is dignity in that too, we’d be able to make it less onerous.”
― Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

“When happiness hits us, we all want to cling to it as tightly and as mercilessly as possible. We want to capture it and hold it between our palms forever, not realising that we have to let it go for it to mean anything at all. That we have to keep moving onward, facing forward, steering constantly into the fearful and unknown, that all the best moments of our lives are still waiting for us on the other side. When we have to leave the things we love behind, we are allowed to mourn them, to miss them, to look back on them dejectedly and sadly. But we must never, ever forget that the best days of our lives are not all behind us, that there are more wonderful things awaiting us in the future than we could ever even fathom. That so many of our happiest days are still ahead. That we have to keep moving to get there. No matter how tempting that view in the rear view mirror is. The future we want will not arrive without our participation. And in order to get there, we have to blindly and blissfully trust that it is going to be somewhere indescribably worth going.”
― Heidi Priebe, This Is Me Letting You Go

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore