#ow

I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank. ↗

— Langston Hughes

#desperation #drowning #poetry #suicide #death

and it is hard to let go, to imagine alternatives, but you are bold with unknowing, you are ready to explore. ↗

— Terra Elan McVoy

#growth #loss #love #friendship

The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. ("The Vane Sisters") ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#snow #winter #family

Trust me, you have to fight. When people are wrong, you've got to let them know it. ↗

— Orlando Cepeda

#got #know #me #people #them

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good. ↗

— Philip Gourevitch

#apathy #auschewitz #evil #genocide #good

If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#death #harry-dresden #death

Who’s Beth?” Keri asked. “The bartender at your wedding.” “Oh, that’s right. How could I forget when my husband almost got thrown out of our own reception for trying to hire her like a hooker or something.” “What’s a hooker?” Bobby asked. Keri’s island tan flushed pink. “Oops.” “You put it on the end of a fishing pole, dummy,” Brian explained. Bobby frowned. “Uncle Joe tried to hire a worm? ↗

— Shannon Stacey

#humor #keri #kevin-kowalski #kowalski #family

We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it. ↗

— Irene Tomkinson

#learning #listening #maturity #teaching #family

I want to be president because I have the sensitivity, as a woman, to listen. I'm a different candidate... different because I don't belong to powerful, privileged groups, because I'm honest. ↗

— Josefina Vazquez Mota

#belong #candidate #different #groups #honest

I remember my brother as such a gentle and loving child, the best big brother a girl could hope for, but I remember when I started to sense our family's world tilting on its axis, the kaleidoscope turning, when things started to go wrong. From then on, it was like we were still ourselves, but our lives played out as though reflected back to us from a funhouse mirror. ↗

— Jessica Warman

#life #upside-down #family