#one

It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline. ↗

— Gabrielle Hamilton

#bones-butter #change

When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#marriage #change

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

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#courage #courage-to-be-oneself #inspirational #inspirational-life #self-determination

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit,l from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play. ↗

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

#change

For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and to provide for it. ↗

— Patrick Henry

#freedom #honesty #revolution #self-examination #truth

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#honesty #truth #truth-telling #courage

I think that if we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we’re alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#loving #courage

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100) ↗

— Rollo May

#freedom #pause #responsibility #courage

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#courage-to-be-oneself #individuality #change