Clio Velentza

“So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.”
― Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping;With Introductory Essays and Excerpts on Walking - by Sydney Smith, William Hazlitt, Leslie Stephen, & John Burroughs

“Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it's painful but it's lived.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“He stared at the young man, trying to gauge his thoughts and abilities. He looked human, every bit of him – but who was to say what one would find if they cut him open? Sandor was seized by the sudden desire to dissect the scrawny body sitting next to him. Would he find flesh and bone, or sawdust and straw? Or perhaps something more sinister? He shook the thought away.”
― Clio Velentza, The Piano Room