Carissa

“Many of us have precisely this experience of dharma: a lifeboat! You cling to it because it is the only boat you have and the storm is rising. You work at it—you row as hard as you possibly can against the storm, because you have to survive. But gradually the seas calm, and you don’t have to row quite so hard, and you actually begin to enjoy the exercise. You get stronger from the exertion—as Gandhi did. Finally, the storm abates. You have a spell of beautiful weather. You feel your strength. You begin to love this rowing. You begin to love the sea itself. You see things in the waves that others do not see. You begin to see that rowing this little boat of dharma connects you to very life. Gradually the task of rowing itself begins to ease. At times it is effortless. There are moments of rapture.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother

“She was smart and terribly determined, this girl-her will was pure steel, through and through-but she was as human as anyone else. She was lonely, too. Lonely in a way that perhaps only single girls fresh from small Midwestern towns know. Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly....perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness- the ache of the uprooted plant.”
― Stephen King, A Winter's Tale: The Breathing Method

“Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles