Ligeja

“To live content with small means.

To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.

To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.

To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all
cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions,
hurry never.

In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.

This is to be my symphony.”
― William Henry Channing

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea