#po

The people they had been last summer, the person she had been--Dicey guessed she'd never be afraid again, not the way she had been all summer. She had taken care of them all, sometimes well, sometimes badly. And they had covered the distances. For most of the summer, they had been unattached. Nobody knew who they were or what they were doing. It didn't matter what they did, as long as they all stayed together. Dicey remembered that feeling, of having things pretty much her own way. And she remembered the feelings of danger. It was a little bit like being a wild animal, she thought to herself. Dicey missed that wildness. She knew she would never have it again. And she missed the sense of Dicey Tillerman against the whole world and doing all right. ↗

— Cynthia Voigt

#growing-up #introspective #poignant #change

Poems are not often simply emotions but One has enough emotions -- they're experience Experience themselves are not important.... ↗

— Angela Suba Natarajan

#experience

I feel like I'm a snow globe and someone shook me up and now every little piece of me is falling back randomly and nothing is ending up where it used to be. ↗

— Amy Reed

#random

It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer. It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#politics #revolution #russia #soviet-union #communism

When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy. ↗

— Matsuo Bashō

#creating #haiku #japanese #poetry #zen

Horror is a feeling that cannot last long; human nature is incapable of supporting it. Sadness, whether it be from bereavement, or disappointment, or misfortune of any kind may linger on through life ↗

— James De Mille

#disappointment #horror #misfortune #sadness #life

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. . . . spontaneity isn't random. ↗

— Malcolm Gladwell

#practice #spontaneity #thin-slicing #random

One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved. ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#contemporary

There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt. ↗

— John Adams

#fiscal-policy #national-debt #nationalism

We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing. ↗

— Konstantin Josef Jireček

#paradox #paradox