#cho

With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair. ↗

— Roman Payne

#choices #decisions #despair #hope #hope-and-despair

We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen. -Orrec- ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#choice #ears #eyes #life

One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's. ↗

— Michael Ignatieff

#life #life

Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently. ↗

— Mark Epstein

#buddhism #desire #psychology #spirituality #life

I wish I wasn't an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I'm sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see me, Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, not the caboose on a train of grand duchesses. Someday, I promise myself, no one will be able to hear my name or look at my picture and suppose they know all about me. Someday I will do something bigger than what I am. ↗

— Sarah Miller

#inspirational #life #otma #romanovs #royalty

What do you want to know, Eden? Do you want to know how upset I am that you are not going to be around anymore, that I'm going to have to disappear out of your life completely? Would you like to know how scared I am that I won't be able to protect you anymore? Maybe you want to know how terrifying it is that you are choosing to hand yourself over to the monarchy; that you are going willingly to be slaughtered and I get absolutely no say in the matter. Or maybe you wan to know how hurt I am. Is that what you want to know? ↗

— Rachel Higginson

#jericho #life

Everyone goes through a period of Traviamento - when we take, say, a different turn in life, the other via. Dante himself did. Some recover, some pretend to recover, some never come back, some chicken out before even starting, and some, for fear of taking any turns, find themselves leading the wrong life all life long. ↗

— André Aciman

#love-and-loss #unrequited-love #life

Because after all… You don't choose your life, your life chooses you ↗

— Shelly Crane

#life #life

Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out. ↗

— Jeannette Walls

#choices #horses #life #reasons #life

I wrote Unwind for lots of reasons, and it poses questions about a lot of subjects. To state it briefly, I wanted to point out how when people take intractable positions on an issue, and stick to extreme sides, sometimes the result is a compromise that is worse than either extreme. I meant it as a wake up call to society -- and to point out that sometimes the problem IS that we take sides on an issue, when a different sort of approach is needed. It's also to pose questions about what it means to be alive. Where does life begin, where does it end -- and point out that there is no single answer to these questions. The problem is people who think there are simple answers. People who see things as simple black-and-white right-and-wrong are the type of people who will end up with a world like the world in Unwind. ↗

— Neal Shusterman

#dystopian #morality #sanctity-of-life #social-commentary #unwind