#breathing

Keep breathing," said Ben. "That's the big thing for now." --"Money Talks ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#money

In the balance of love and loss, it was love that made me struggle to… Breathe. ↗

— Rebecca Donovan

#breathing #emma-thomas #loss #love #reason-to-breathe

We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space and protect. ↗

— Sissela Bok

#both #breathing #burden #childhood #confers

I love hiking in the mountains in Aspen. Breathing the clean, fresh air is great. Plus, it gives me a cardiovascular workout and firms my legs. ↗

— Chris Evert

#aspen #breathing #cardiovascular #clean #firms

I contend that Bush would be a lot more moderate if there weren't some fundamentalists breathing down his neck every time he wants to establish the state of Israel, every time he wants to do justice for the Palestinian people. ↗

— Tony Campolo

#bush #contend #down #establish #every

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#critical #end #fair #history #justifies

I opened the large central window of my office room to its full on the fine early May morning. Then I stood for a few moments, breathing in the soft, warm air that was charged with the scent of white lilacs below. ↗

— Angus Wilson

#below #breathing #central #charged #early

Rather than allowing our response to an even affect our breathing, we can learn instead to let our breathing change our relationship to the event. ↗

— Cyndi Lee

#anger #breath #breathing #buddha #buddhism

oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#breathing #death #dying #love #poetry

I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#death #generations #mortality #time #death