#iv

What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that. ↗

— Cheryl Strayed

#goals #life #life-and-living #beauty

You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen walking this earth. ↗

— Michelle Mead

#sydney-sage #the-golden-lily #beauty

Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#class-struggle #excess #french-revolution #grandeur #louis-xiv

She was singed, bleeding, bruised, and furiously alive. ↗

— J.D. Robb

#furious #death

I try to take people one at a time, with all the contradictions and compromises that most of us live with. ↗

— Garry Trudeau

#contradictions #i #live #most #people

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#contemplation #derived #elevating #i #intense

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood. ↗

— Rudolfo Anaya

#beauty #bless #childhood #llano #me

Failure and things of this sort - you can take it one of two ways. You can either let that hurt you and really affect the way that you live your life in the future, or you can use that as an opportunity for growth. ↗

— Matt Emmons

#either #failure #future #growth #hurt

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#writers #writing #art

When he put the old-fashioned mechanical toy on her palm, she stopped breathing. It was a tiny representation of an atom, complete with colored ball bearings standing in for neutrons, protons, and on the outside, arranged on arcs of fine wire, electrons. Turning the key on the side made the electrons move, what she’d thought were ball bearings actually finely crafted spheres of glass that sparked with color. A brilliant, thoughtful, wonderful gift for a physics major. “Why magnesium?” she asked, identifying the atomic number of the light metal. His hand on her jaw, his mouth on her own. “Because it’s beautifully explosive, just like my X. ↗

— Nalini Singh

#explosive #hawke #lovers #sienna #beauty