#times

Sometimes that mantle is hard to adjust to wearing but we are at a stage that we are comfortable with it and we recognize how we are perceived and how the real core individual that each one of us has apart from the facade that the public believes that we are. ↗

— James Young

#apart #believes #comfortable #core #each

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print. ↗

— Marguerite Yourcenar

#bores #family #getting #hand #his

The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature. ↗

— J.M. Coetzee

#suicide #change

Maude regards the ones who don't make it as her own personal failures. "I guess I didn't put enough emphasis on 'until death do you part,'" she says sourly, whenever she hears about the latest divorce. "Sad to say, but some are in it just for the good times. Married folks, they gotta be like that cat's claw acacia I've got growin' in my yard. Gotta grab hard and hold on tight when the going gets rough. Only way to get through the bad times. Grab hard, hold on, and ride. No matter what. ↗

— Susan Wittig Albert

#cat-s-claw #divorce #marriage #death

The only way to cry your eyes out and laugh your ass off at the same time is to have your mom or girlfriends present. Without them, the laughing part wouldn't be nearly as fun. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#despair #girlfriends #humor #laughing #moms

Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#eccentric #happiness #hard-times #inspirational #ridiculous

Read not the Times, read the Eternities. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#inspirational #newspapers #times #inspirational

Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. … All those things. ↗

— R.M. Engelhardt

#on-writing #poet #poetry #quotes #r-m-engelhardt

My voice was a bare rasp of fear. "In the weaving room, the women say it's never been this bad before..." "They always say that when things get difficult," she answered softly. Then she sat up suddenly as though coming fully awake. Reaching down, she took my chin in her hand and tipped my face to look up at hers. "Remember, Gwen, no matter who says what, the important thing is to understand what needs to be done, and then do it. No matter how hard it is, or how much pain you feel. It's as simple as that, really. Once you know what you have to do, you just do it. ↗

— Persia Woolley

#hard-times #inspirational #mother-daughter #inspirational

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15). ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#dark #high #joy #kingsolver #life