#the

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language. ↗

— Pierre Boulle

#books #imitation #language #theme #writing

Then holding the star aloft and the bright sword advanced, Frodo, hobbit of the Shire, walked steadily down to meet the eyes. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#inspirational #lord-of-the-rings #middle-earth #motivational #tolkien

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit? ↗

— Pat Conroy

#life #life-is-short #live-in-the-moment #inspirational

You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be. ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#changing #growing-up #growth #journey #leaving

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#chaos #civilization #desires #necessity #order

I tried to make my husband make his daughter like me. After ten years of failed attempts, I decided to make myself change. ↗

— Valerie J. Lewis Coleman

#stepfamily #stepmother #change

But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place. ↗

— William Landay

#life-and-living #the-world #inspirational

Instead of bracing yourself for the perils of the unknown, embrace the joy that is here, in your present moment. ↗

— Michelle Cruz-Rosado

#live-in-the-moment #michelle-rosado #motivational #inspirational

Planting trees, I myself thought for a long time, was a feel-good thing, a nice but feeble response to our litany of modern-day environmental problems. In the last few years, though, as I have read many dozens of articles and books and interviewed scientists here and abroad, my thinking on the issue has changed. Planting trees may be the single most important ecotechnology that we have to put the broken pieces of our planet back together. ↗

— Jim Robbins

#the-future #trees #change

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#catholicism #christianity #god #hearts #heaven