#ear

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable. ↗

— Sándor Márai

#fear #secrets #sharing-secrets #writing #life

There are probably other things in the world the sheep can't teach me, thought the boy as he regarded the old merchant. All they ever do really is look for food and water. And maybe it wasn't that they were teaching me but that I was learning from them. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#food

Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too. ↗

— Will Smith

#bad #cause #consume #deal #disrespect

It is tragic to see how the religious sentiment of the West has become so individualized that concepts such as "a contrite heart," have come to refer only to the personal experiences of guilt and willingness to do penance for it. The awareness of our impurity in thoughts, words and deeds can indeed put us in a remorseful mood and create in us the hope for a forgiving gesture. But if the catastrophical events of our days, the wars, mass murders, unbridled violence, crowded prisons, torture chambers, the hunger and the illness of millions of people and he unnamable misery of a major part of the human race is safely kept outside the solitude of our hearts, our contrition remains no more than a pious emotion. ↗

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

#heart #pious #experience

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me. ↗

— Judy Collins

#forgiveness #growing #hope #learning #love

The pow'r I have on you is to spare you / The malice towards you, to forgive you. Posthumus ↗

— William Shakespeare

#power #shakespeare-s-wit #forgiveness

It is difficult sharing and capturing so many years of memories and the people behind the words-and even though that guest book can speak volumes, in between, the pages remain so silent. ↗

— Eugenie Anderson

#between #book #capturing #difficult #even

Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#love #forgiveness

We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action. ↗

— Sarojini Naidu

#courage #deeper #earnestness #greater #motive

UP You wake up filled with dread. There seems no reason for it. Morning light sifts through the window, there is birdsong, you can't get out of bed. It's something about the crumpled sheets hanging over the edge like jungle foliage, the terry slippers gaping their dark pink mouths for your feet, the unseen breakfast--some of it in the refrigerator you do not dare to open--you will not dare to eat. What prevents you? The future. The future tense, immense as outer space. You could get lost there. No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density and drowned events pressing you down, like sea water, like gelatin filling your lungs instead of air. Forget all that and let's get up. Try moving your arm. Try moving your head. Pretend the house is on fire and you must run or burn. No, that one's useless. It's never worked before. Where is it coming form, this echo, this huge No that surrounds you, silent as the folds of the yellow curtains, mute as the cheerful Mexican bowl with its cargo of mummified flowers? (You chose the colours of the sun, not the dried neutrals of shadow. God knows you've tried.) Now here's a good one: you're lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive? ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#fear #forgiveness #future #life #past