smilljns

“Even if you get away with it, you'll never be able to come home."
"Well, so, tough titty. Anyway, home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“I wanted to tell him what had just happened. I wanted to say it was the first time I had been able to decide how to react to something bad, even such a small thing, instead of coming to consciousness in the middle of already reacting. I said I hadn't known you could choose how to feel instead of being overpowered by an emotion from outside yourself. I said I couldn't explain it properly. I didn't feel like a different person, I felt like myself. As though I had been found.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“THE JOURNEY There is every reason to despair due to all the present events that seem out of our control, but there is every reason to hope that with attention and discipline, we can bring ourselves and our societies, through a kind of necessary seasonal disappearance, back into the realm of choice. Firstly, the easy part: despair. The world at present seems to be a mirror to many of our worst qualities. We could not have our individual fears and prejudices, our wish to feel superior to others, and our deep desire not to be touched by the heartbreak and vulnerabilities that accompany every life, more finely drawn and better represented in the outer world than are presented to us now, by the iconic and often ugly political figures, encouraging the worst in their fellows that dominate our screens and our times. Life is fierce and difficult. There is no life we can live without being subject to grief, loss and heartbreak. Half of every conversation is mediated through disappearance. Thus, there is every reason to want to retreat from life, to carry torches that illuminate only our own view, to make enemies of life and of others, to hate what we cannot understand and to keep the world and the people who inhabit it at a distance through prejudicial naming; but therefore, it also follows, that our ability to do the opposite, to meet the other in the world on their own terms, without diminishing them, is one of the necessary signatures of human courage; and one we are being asked to write, above all our flaws and difficulties, across the heavens of this, our present time. The essence in other words of The Journey.”
― David Whyte, David Whyte: Essentials

“I think about the earth’s rotation, and realise that it’s not the tide that is going out or the moon rising: rather, I am moving away from them.”
― Amy Liptrot, The Outrun