#ss

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#gardening #hubris #nature #wild #wilderness

It's a blessing Madame Gamache and I had at our wedding. It was read at the end of the ceremony. Now you will feel no rain For each of you will be shelter for the other Now you will feel no cold For each of you will be warmth for the other Now there is no loneliness for you Now there is no more loneliness. Now you are two persons, but there is one life before you. Go now to your dwelling place To enter into the days of your togetherness. And may your days be good and long upon this earth. (Apache Blessing) ↗

— Louise Penny

#life

This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft. ↗

— Robin Hobb

#royal-assassin #the-fool #life

Some days I miss flying so much it makes my entire chest hurt, feels like I can't breathe sometimes. I try not to think about the fact that I'll never have thousands of feet of air between me and the ground again. But it's those times that I have to remind myself that at least I got the chance to do it sometime in my life. A couple dozen solo flights are better than having never done it at all. ↗

— Keary Taylor

#flying #missing #life

But there is nothing enduring in the world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface. ↗

— Nikolai Gogol

#joy #life #sadness #time #life

If you listen quietly enough life will whisper its secrets to you ↗

— Rasheed Ogunlaru

#life #life-lessons-lessons #rasheed-ogunlaru #secrets-of-the-universe #secrets-to-happiness

We would be allowed to work and not cause any trouble for her, but she didn't want us to be any more successful than she was ↗

— Jean Kwok

#life

I told her running away from your problems doesn't solve anything. Really it just hurts the people who count on you. ↗

— Kyle Beachy

#problems #running #the-slide #life

Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic wars going on inside millions and millions of individuals. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#selfishness #war #life

I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it. ↗

— Asa Gray

#am #anyone #better #calling #convinced