#end

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. ↗

— Graham Greene

#beginning #creative-process #end #storytelling #writing

Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is, because you know people who have similar experiences. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#inspirational #lemony-snicket #experience

Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#heaven #love #paradox #reflection #communication

He danced the way he made love, with passion and tenderness and spirit, communicating with hands and eyes the most subtle messages, tenderly making up for Lila's awkwardness. In his lashes and his hair, mist clung in tiny diamond drops. She could not take her eyes from him. ↗

— Ruth Wind

#dancing #lovemaking #tenderness #communication

Love is not getting high on fantasies of romance, the perfect lover, absolute happiness and sexual ecstasy. Love is based on a two way communication and respect, and that only exists between equals. ↗

— Anselma Dell'Olio

#feminism #gender-equality #love #communication

A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don’t care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching—they are your family. And they were my heroes. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#courage #family #friendship #harry-dresden #karrin-murphy

Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone. ↗

— Paul Tillich

#independence #language #loneliness #pain #paradox

A true friend unbosoms freely, advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably ↗

— William Penn

#courage

Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#exigence #favor #friends #friendship #friendship

Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#democracy #equality #independence #liberty #subversive