Sarah

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“He’s not perfect. You aren’t either, and the two of you will never be perfect. But if he can make you laugh at least once, causes you to think twice, and if he admits to being human and making mistakes, hold onto him and give him the most you can. He isn’t going to quote poetry, he’s not thinking about you every moment, but he will give you a part of him that he knows you could break. Don’t hurt him, don’t change him, and don’t expect for more than he can give. Don’t analyze. Smile when he makes you happy, yell when he makes you mad, and miss him when he’s not there. Love hard when there is love to be had. Because perfect guys don’t exist, but there’s always one guy that is perfect for you.”
― Bob Marley

“She moves deftly and quietly through misogyny. In recent years her voice has become more pervasive, more intriguing. She has been too easily labelled and stuffed back down, she is careful not to wear a sticker defending herself. She rose lately as ‘feminist’, but that was torn away from her, made distasteful, attacked and vilified. So now she is creeping in simply as female, as feminine, as a billion different women pursuing a million different injustices. She is at every corner; she is calling us out. She isn’t yelling. She is writing, singing, tweeting and sharing. She is meeting with other females, over cake, in meditation, with coffee and babies, with tea and trumpets. She is coaxing the males into their better power, requesting that they see, do and be better. She is recreating the earth in personal, unique and subtle ways. So small these steps she takes that one day we will turn around and say, ‘We women did that... We snuck our lives onto the agenda without it being noticed. We tore down the patriarchy one sentence at a time, one text, one status update, one outfit, one hairy armpit, one truth, one smile, one grimace, one Instagram post at a time.’ She does not go head to head with The Emperor. That failed. She cannot win at his game.”
― Alice B. Grist, Dirty & Divine: a transformative journey through tarot

“If you want to know the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
― Ziad Masri, Reality Unveiled