#ding

Nothing is old, nothing is new, save the light of grace underneath which beats a human heart. The way of feeling, of understanding, of loving; the way of seeing the country, the faces that your father saw, that your mother knew. The rest is chimerical. ↗

— Georges Rouault

#chimerical #country #faces #father #feeling

The priest then turning toward the bride, inquired: "Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband, etc., etc., so long as ye both shall live?" To which the bride, throwing aside her veil, answered, firmly: "No! Not if he were the last man and I the last woman on the face of the earth and the human race was about to become extinct and the angel of Gabriel came down from above to ask it of me as a personal favor." The effect of this outburst, this revelation, this explosion, may be imagined but can never be adequately described. ↗

— E.D.E.N. Southworth

#reversal #wedding #imagination

Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books. ↗

— Jackson Pearce

#inspirational #reading #teens #inspirational

There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#acting #artifice #falsehood #game #games

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, The person who never reads lives only one. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#reading #inspirational

Use your gifts well and you will discover others, among them a gift that is uniquely you. See these noble gifts in other people. Share the truth and be ready for the miracle to unfold ↗

— Charlene Costanzo

#character-building #furture #hope #inner-gifts #inspiration

The ninth gift is Reverence. May you appreciate the wonder that you are and the miracle of all creation. ↗

— Charlene Costanzo

#character-building #creation #inspiration #respect #reverence

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling. ↗

— Dorothy Allison

#understanding #writing #forgiveness

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech] ↗

— Lois Lowry

#on-writing #freedom

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. ↗

— John Milton

#according #argue #conscience #freely #give