Kim Roen

“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“feeling passed, and what took its place was something akin to bliss. Sitting on the porch with Mildred was not a respite from another task but a way to spend the day. Cleaning the kitchen could wait until tomorrow; dusting George’s study could wait a lifetime. There were stretches where she did not even bathe. A life without motion, without expectations—it was the secret she kept from the outside world, for no one else comprehended the great joy in abandonment, in giving up and starting over with a blank page, a page that might never be filled.”
― Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water

“Lars is more than the mere product of his world, though. He has depths of kindness that Rhea feels she lacks in herself. She does not have his capacity for forgiveness. Her emotions and mind and self are more tightly wound, more intertwined in an eternal dialogue for meaning and purpose and expression. She has a compulsion to articulate and expound, to render the world explicable, if only to herself. Letting it be, moving through, submitting to silence—these are not her ways. They are for Lars. He comes to terms with humanity as it presents itself. He expresses himself not in a torrent of words and ideas and disruptions, revelations and setbacks, but through an ever-expanding capacity to face what comes next. To see it clearly. To say what needs to be said and then stop. What is for her an act of will is for Lars a process of life.”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

“All this doesn’t invade you somehow? Disrupt everything? Hollow you?” Lars puts down the coffee”
― Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night