#wilde

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (this excerpt inspired my book, The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap. Wilde wrote it to his lover while in prison.) When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. ↗

— Paulette Mahurin

#on-freedom #oscar-wilde #beauty

She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour. ↗

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

#death #death-and-dying #disease #malaria #sickness

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time. ↗

— Bill McKibben

#nature #trees #wilderness #woods #imagination

A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#environmentalism #slum #wilderness #zoo #environmentalism

How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it! ↗

— Hortense Odlum

#been #bewildered #death #face #face reality

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered. ↗

— Logan P. Smith

#know #old #sad #want #young

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#find #friend #honest #our #travelers

In my wildest dreams I never thought - well, I never thought I'd work. ↗

— Steve Carell

#i #never #thought #well #wildest

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I. ↗