#ado

I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#foreshadowing #striving #excellence

In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the “Way of the brush”—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the “Way of flowers.” Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular. ↗

— H.E. Davey

#budo #do #efficiency #flowers #ikebana

He strips his shirt over his head and I catch my breath, watching those long hard muscles ripple. I know how his shoulders look, bunched, when he's on top of me, how his face gets tight with lust, as he eases inside me. "Who am I?" "Jericho" "Who are you?" He kicks off his boots, steps out of his pants. He's commando tonight. My breath whooshes out of me in a run-on word: "Whogivesafuck? ↗

— Karen Marie Moning

#mac #shadowfever #lust

And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie's written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I'm reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She's right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can't be landed, stuck in the climb—alive, alive, ALIVE. ↗

— Elizabeth Wein

#maddie-bradott #nonsense

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals. ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#animal-rights #animals #theodor-w-adorno #cruelty

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come? ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#divorce

La amaba lo suficiente para saber que ella estaría mejor sin él. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#spanish #spanish

A fear of weakness only strengthens weakness. ↗

— Criss Jami

#denial #facing #facing-fear #facing-problems #fear

His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#teaching #time-travel #paradox

In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind,...The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain. ↗

— David Richo

#loss #transitions #paradox