#lt

Thank you for explaining that my eye cancer isn't going to make me deaf. I feel so fortunate that an intellectual giant like yourself would deign to operate on me. ↗

— John Green

#hazel-grace #john-green #the-fault-in-our-stars #grace

At Tara in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By God's almighty help and grace Between myself and the powers of darkness! ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#speculative-fiction #young-adult #grace

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it. ↗

— Groucho Marx

#wonder

You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus. ↗

— John Green

#names #perception #the-fault-in-our-stars #perception

That was the thing about best friends. Like sisters and mothers, they could piss you off and make you cry and break your heart, but in the end, when the chips were down, they were there, making you laugh even in your darkest hours. ↗

— Kristin Hannah

#laugh

Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#danger #law #organized-religion #power #religion

Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star. ↗

— Laini Taylor

#happiness #young-adult #comfort

...it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person's lover. There would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There'd be little cooling then. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#ardor #fidelity #love #love

I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#culture #identity #prejudice #art

In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth) ↗

— Wendell Berry

#earth #laertes #odysseus #odyssey #art