Moving Day Annoucement

Dear thoughtful readers,

I don't know how many of you out there have been reading this blog. But if you have been reading this blog, I wanted to deeply thank you. (If you are new - hello!) I hope some of the quotes I have collected here have meant something to you as it did to me.

I first started this blog with little expectation but full of curiosity. 6 years have now passed and my blog has only matured. After going through a phase of massive reading and coming across so many quotes I wanted to keep, I wanted to take another step to upgrade this website again.

This time - we are going to a new website. I will keep this current site open for a while but am planning to eventually deactivate it. So please come visit me at my new site! I have already transferred all the previous quotes from this site so you won't have to worry about losing anything.

In fact, I have now launched 3 new sites - Two are from my blogspot blogs and one is a new one that will bridge all three.

• The Quote Blog (which you are reading now will be here):  http://wishstarquotes.wordpress.com
• The Thought Blog (which I also had blogspot will be archived here): http://wishstarthinksdotcom.wordpress.com/
• My new Main Website is my creative zone for writing, etc. If you forget the other two, remember this site because this will connect all of my blogs, including my travel one: http://monicahkang.com/
• Lastly, if you have not visited my Travel blog here it is: http://monicatravelsfar.com

Or just want to say a hello? Drop an email at himonicahkang@gmail.com

Thank you for visiting and reading! I hope to see you at my new site!


Sincerely,

Monica Kang

"Everything's impossible until somebody does it."

"No one can't tell you you can't learn about yourself. No one can't tell you you can't push yourself to your limits. No one can't tell you you can't surround yourself with inspiring people and stay away from those who put you down. You can't control everything. In fact, most of the things in life you have no control. But these are some things you can."

"Everything was impossible until someone did it. Do the things that inspire us and can inspire others. But we can't do that if we don't look for it. What would this world be like if 80% of the people did what they loved to do. Now I will leave you with one question. What is the work that you cannot stand to do?" What is one work that you absolutely would love to do?

From TedTalk: How to Find  and Do Work We Love by Scott Dinsmore

"Everthing's impossible until somebody does it."  - Bruce Wayne. Startup quote. 

"Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life."

Algernon: Well, what shall we do?
Jack: Nothing!
Algermon: It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.

[ ...]

Jack: This ghastly state of things is what you call Bumburying I suppose?
Algermon: Yes, and a perfectly wonderful Bunbury it is. The most wonderful Bunbury I have ever had in my life.
Jack:  Well, you've no right whatsoever to Bunbury here.
Algemon: That is absurd. One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that.
Jack: Serious Bumburyist? Good Heavens!
Algemon: Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life. I happen to be serious about Bumburying. What on earth you are serious about I haven't got the remotest idea. About everything, I should fancy. You have such an absolutely trivial nature.

From The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

"The trick is not caring what EVERYONE thinks of you and just caring about what the RIGHT people think of you."

"The trick is not caring what EVERYONE thinks of you and just caring about what the RIGHT people think of you."

By Brian Michael Bendis

"We have to be constantly jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

"The good earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

"We have to be constantly jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

From If This isn't nice, What is?: Advice for the Young by Kurt Vonnegut

"You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life. Say thank you."

Dear Sugar,

I read your column religiously. I'm twenty-two. From what I can tell by your writing, you're in your early forties. My question is short and sweet: What would you tell your twentysomething self if you could talk to her now?

Love,
Seeking Wisdom

Dear Seeking Wisdom,

Stop worrying about whether you're fat. You're not fat. Or rather, you're sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.  [...]

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It's good you've worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness. [...]

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. Your are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday You don't know what it is yet.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give in. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you've gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She'll offer you one of the balloons, but you won't take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You're wrong. You do.

Your assumption about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naive pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you. [...]

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. Those things are you becoming.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that saved you months to buy, don't look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don't hold it up and say it's longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life.

Say thank you.

Yours,
Sugar

From  Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

"This is not rocket science here, people. Start with time for what'smost important."

"Terry Monaghan's approach to time management is simple: You can't manage time. Time never changes. There will always and ever be 168 hours in a week. What you can manage are the activities you choose to do in time. And what busy and overwhelmed people need to realize, she said, is that you will never be able to do everything you think you need, want, or should do. "When we die, the e-mail in-box will still be full. The to-do list will still be there. But you won't," she told us. "Eighty-percent of the email that comes in is crap anyway, and it takes you the equivalent of nineteen and a half weeks a year just to sort through. Eighty percent of your to-do list is crap. Look, the stuff of life never ends. That is life. You will never clear your plate so you can finally allow yourself to get the good stuff. So you have to decide. What do you want to accomplish in this life? What's important to you right now? And realize that what's important now may not be two years from now. It's always changing."

Monaghan looks at us starting forlornly at our blank Perfect Schedules. She sighs. "This is not rocket science here, people," she says. "Start with time for what's most important."

But that's where I got stuck. Everything seemed important. My work. My family. My friends. My community. Changing the kitty litter. Sorting my daughter's Barbie shoes. Keeping the incoming tide if clutter in the house at bay....

P.256

"The essence of their advice all seemed to boil down to what my kids learned in preschool: Plan. Do. Review. Take time to figure out what's important in the moment and what you want to accomplish in life. If you're ambivalent, notice it. Pick something anyway. Embrace it. Play. Try one approach. Assess. If that isn't working, ditch it and play with something else. Keep yourself accountable but enjoy the process. There is no right answer. This is life."

P.266

"Working continuously, without breaks, is in fact a surefire way to produce subpar work. Scientists have long known that, during sleep, the brain consolidates new information and skills by making new connections between neurons, effectively rewiring the brain. Neuroscientists in Sydney have found that that rewiring happens during the day as well, when we take a break. [...] Pulsing - deactivating and reactivating the brain - actually makes it pay better attention. The brain evolved to detect and respond to change, always alert to danger."

"Breaks also inspire creativity. Scientists have found that people who take time to daydream score higher on tests of creativity. And there's a very good biochemical reason why your best ideas and those flashes of insight tend to come not when you've got your nose to the grindstone, oh ideal worker, but in the shower."

P.267-8

"But as our time horizons grow shorter [as we grow older and realize we have only a short amount of time left in life], we start to see the world differently. We start to see that what matters most are often the simple things - the smell of roses, watching your grandchildren splash in a puddle, the smile on a face of an old friend you're meeting for coffee. It's those little moments that you start to focus on." And by focusing on what's important and beauty of the small moments, she said. Older people are actually happier.

P.272

"Be silent everyday. Even if that means taking five breaths. Being mindful for less than a half hour a day will, literally, expand your brain."

"Choose ONE thing that's most important to do every day."

"Find Your Own Private Netherlands."

"Understand the story that drives your flavor of "not enough." Notice it. Get clear about how you define success, what you want and your time horizon. As Steve Jobs said, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

"Banish busyness."

"Live an authentic life."

P279-286 - Appendix: Do One Thing

From Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play when No One Has The Time. By Brigid Schulte. 

"Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing."

From Introduction of the Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

"Sooner or later," V.S. Pritchett wrote in 1941 essay, "the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing." But this is not all completely true with all artists. Every artists had a different routine but a very unique one.

"In that sense, this is a superficial book. It's about the circumstances of creative activity, not the product; it deals with manufacturing rather than meaning. But it's also, inevitably, personal. My underlying concerns in the book are issues that I struggle with in my own life: How do you do meaningful creative work while also earning a living? Is it better to devote yourself wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day? And when there doesn't seem to be enough time for all you hope to accomplish, must you give things up (sleep, income, a clean house), or can you learn to condense activities, to do more in less time, to "work smarter, not harder," as my dad is always telling me? More broadly are comfort and creativity incompatible, or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained creative work?"

Below is a selection of random quotes from the book.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

"Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straight forward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers."

William James (1842-1910)

"The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation."

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

"Do you know what moviemaking is?" Bergman asked in a 1964 interview. "Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don't come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you're going to get your good ten minutes this time."

John Adams (b. 1947)

"My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits," Adams said in a recent interview. "Because creativity, particularity the kind of work I do - which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music -s is just, it's very labor-intensive. And it's something that you can't do with an assistant. You have to do it all by yourself."

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

"I wish I had a routine for writing," Miller told an interviewer in 1999. "I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio and I write. And then I tear it up! That's the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm."

"A friend, above all, is somebody who does not judge you."

"A friend, above all, is somebody who does not judge you. I have told you that he is somebody who opens his doors to the vagabond, with his crutch, with his stick, which he has set down in a corner and he does not ask him to dance, so that he can judge his dance. And if the vagabond tells of the spring he passed on the road outside, a friend is somebody who welcomes the spring within him. And if he tells of the horror of the famine in the village he comes from, he suffers that famine with him. For I have told you, the friend in the man, is the part that is for you and that opens a door for you which he may possibly never open anywhere else. Your friend is true and all that he says is true, and he loves you even if he hates you in the other house. And the friend in the temple is he who, thank God, I brush past and meet, he who turns to me the same face as my own, lit up by the same God, for then unity is achieved, even if elsewhere, he is a shopkeeper, while I am a captain, or a gardener while I am a sailor on the sea. Over and beyond our discussions, I have found him and his friend. And I can be silent near him, that is to say, not fear anything from him concerning my interior gardens and my mountains and my ravines and my deserts, for he won't place his feet there. You, my friend, what you receive from me with love is like the ambassador of my interior empire. And you treat it well and you let it sit down and you listen to it. And we are happy."

Wisdom of the Sands - Saint Exupery

From Saint Exupery: Art, Writing and Musings by Nathalie Des Vallieres

"It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that."

Ira Glass, "On the Creative Process"
Important Advice from Ira on How to Become a Writer

"That smile saved me."

"Then the miracle happened. Oh! a very discreet miracle. I had no cigarette. As one of my guards was smoking, I asked him, by gesture, showing the vestige of a smile, if he would give me one. The man first stretched himself, slowly passed his hand across his brow, raised his eyes, no longer to my tie but to my face, and, to my great astonishment, he also attempted a smile. It was like the dawning of the day.

This miracle did not conclude the tragedy, it removed it altogether, as light does shadow. There had been no tragedy. This miracle altered nothing visible. The feeble oil lamp, the table scattered with papers, the men propped against the wall, the colors, the smell, everything remained unchanged. Yet everything was transformed in its very substance. That smile saved me. It was a sign just as final, as obvious in its future consequences, as unchangeable as the rising of the sun. It marked the beginning of a new era. Nothing had changed, everything was changed. The table scattered with papers became alive. The oil lamp became alive. The walls were alive. The boredom dripping from every lifeless thing in that cellar grew lighter as if by magic. It seemed that an invisible stream of blood had started flowing again, connecting all things in the same body, and restoring to them their significance.

The men had not moved either, but, though a minute earlier they had seemed to be farther away from me than an antediluvian species, now they grew into contemporary life. I had an extraordinary feeling of presence. That is it: of presence. And I was aware of a connection.

The boy who had smiled at me, and who, until a few minutes before, had been nothing but a function, a tool, a kind of monstrous insect, appeared now rather awkward, almost shy, of a wonderful shyness — that terrorist! He was no less a brute than any other. But the revelation of the man in him shed such a light upon his vulnerable side! We men assume haughty airs, but within the depth of our hearts, we know hesitation, doubt, grief.

Nothing had yet been said. Yet everything was resolved."

From Brainpicking "How a Smile Saved Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Life: A Soul-Lifting Meditation on Our Shared Humanity" Letter to a Hostage by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

"Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness."

"Everywhere, even in rural America it seems, people strive to be busy. They tell pollsters they're too busy to register to vote. To look busy and important - or because they can't help themselves -people obsessively check their smartphones every ten minutes. In surveys, people say they're too busy to make friends outside the office, too busy to date, too busy to sleep, and too busy to have sex. Eight in ten Britons report being too busy to eat dessert, even though four in ten say dessert is better than sex. We're in such a rush that the typical sound bite for a presidential candidate has been compressed from forty seconds in 1968 to 7.3 seconds in 2000.

Remember those unused vacation days? People say they're too busy to take vacation and too busy for a lunch break. [...] Being superbusy has become so normal that it's now a joke.

[But] Life in the early twenty-first century wasn't supposed to be so busy. [...] In the 1950s, work hours did finally begin to fall. Leisure time was on the rise. "So my question," Ben Hunnicutt told me, "is what the hell happened?"

Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, Ben Hunnicutt says, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness. 'Then we starve the capacity we have to love,' he said. 'It creates this "unique heart," as Saint Augustine said, that is ever desperate for fulfillment."

p. 48-53

From Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One has the Time by Brigid Schulte

"The point is that accidents do not cause war. Decisions cause war. Accidents can trigger decisions; and this may be all that anybody meant."

Nobel Prize-winning economist and strategic thinker Thomas C. Schelling wrote about accidents in the September 1960 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Here are some excerpts from “Meteors, Mischief and War:”

“The point is that accidents do not cause war. Decisions cause war. Accidents can trigger decisions; and this may be all that anybody meant. But the distinction needs to be made, because the remedy is not just preventing accidents but constraining decisions.

“If we think of the decisions as well as the accidents we can see that accidental war, like premeditated war, is subject to “deterrence.” Deterrence, it is usually said, is aimed at the rational calculator in full control of his faculties and his forces; accidents may trigger war in spite of deterrence. But it is really better to consider accidental war as the deterrence problem, not a separate one…

“Thus the accident-prone character of strategic forces—more correctly, the sensitivity of strategic decisions to possible accidents—is closely related to the security of the forces themselves. If a country’s retaliatory weapons are reasonably secure against surprise attack, preemptive or premeditated, it need not respond so quickly. Not only can one wait and see, but one can assume that the enemy himself, knowing that one can wait and see, is less afraid of a precipitate decision, less preoccupied with his own need to preempt.

“What matters is whether this affects the way we wish to conduct the war. If the concept of ‘accidental war’—or whatever we choose to call a war that is not initiated altogether deliberately—has any meaning, it is probably a war in which our urge for revenge and retaliation is less than our urge to curtail the consequences of the error, regardless of whose error it was. If our object, in the event war should come, is to save as much of the country as possible and to provide for its further security, we should think not only about how to deter war, and how to enter it most effectively if it comes, but how to terminate it to best advantage.”

From  "Nuclear Weapon Accidents," by Michael Krepon in Arms Control Wonks

"틀린 게 아니라 다른 것뿐이야"

개굴개굴개구리가 고래고래 소리친다

틀린 게 아니라 다른 것뿐이야

- 청개구리. 로이킴 노래 중

Stop living a "koyaanisqatsi" life, and start living a "profiter" life

"Profiter"- (v) to make the most of an opportunity, to savor life around you. (French)

- From a friend

"Koyaanisqatsi" - life out of balance, a way of living that calls for another way of living. (Hopi Langugae) 

- From the Second Wind: Navigating the passage to a slower, deeper, and more connected life. By Dr. Bill Thomas. 

"The human world.. It's a mess."

"Ariel, listen to me. The human world... It's a mess. Life under the sea is better than anything that goes up there."

"Under the Sea" from the Little Mermaid 

- Happy Sunday reflection!

http://video.disney.com/watch/lyric-video-under-the-sea-4e232e88a1b97e24f1ff9e5b

"what people say doesn't mean much. It's what they do that predicts thefuture."

"A fifth lesson is that what goes right is more important than what goes wrong, and that it is the quality of child's total experience, not any particular trauma or any particular relationship, that exerts the clearest influence on adult psychology. [...]

A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change and so do factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either. Inheriting the genes for alcoholism can turn the most otherwise blessed golden boy into a trainwreck. Conversely, an encounter with a very dangerous disease liberated the pitiful young Dr. Camille from life of dependency and loneliness." (P.52)

"And we found that the fifty-nine men with the warmest childhoods made 50 percent more money than the sixty-three men with the bleakest childhoods." (113)

"Remember, Garrick was only the first of the men to reach ninety-five [...]. Can we learn anything from Daniel Garrick's life about the keys to graceful aging? [...] He certainly didn't follow most of the conventional "rules" for long life. His parents were not long-lived

. [..] He didn't really start to exercise until he was almost sixty. He smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for twenty years, and nine pipes a day for decades after that. During his sixties, he drank enough that he and his future wife worried about it. [... But] Remember, way back in college he had bicycled 5 miles back and forth to class after being up all night and had gotten top marks for being "well integrated" and "self-starting," both traits associated with longevity in the Study. 

From the very beginning Garrick had a quality of indomitability, and maybe that was really what enabled him to live so long. Nobody in the Grant Study waited longer or worked harder than he did to get a college education. [...] He never gave up, and he never have up hope." (239-240)

"As I keep reminding myself, what people say doesn't mean much. It's what they do that predicts the future. It was the facts of people's long-term love relationships, not their belief systems, that showed us what we needed to know first about their capacity to love, and then about their mental health." (353)

"This extraordinary telescope has brought great joy and meaning into my life. [...] And I become more and more aware that the Study, and the work we've done with it, has encouraged other people to think about their own lives and the lives of others. Not statistically, perhaps, but with a little more curiosity and a little more interest and a little more kindness. And how can that hurt?" (370)

- My new all-time favorite book. 

Triumphs of Experience: The Men of The Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant

"And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going towork?"

"Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right. 

The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common; looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea. I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?

And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the home. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked."

From Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art speech. 

Love by Tolstoy

"Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them."

Leo Tolstoy 

Failure

"It is not our failures that define us but rather how we respond to our failures. We have the choice how to respond to what already happened." #NCC

Let it go

12 year old Lexi Walker and Alex Boye creating a new version of "Let it go" that I keep putting under my 'replay music' list.

"There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read."

"Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff that isn't too great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams at Western Union"

- Edward Albee

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read. "The rest you learn from books."

How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen 

Love, said Edith Piaf

American journalist: If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?

Edith Piaf: Love.

American journalist: To a young girl?

Edith Piaf: Love.

American journalist: To a child?

Edith Piaf: Love.

From La Vie En Rose, about Edith Piaf

"to pay attention to the things I'll probably never need to know"

"It was for me the start of a lesson that I never stop having to learn: to pay attention to the things I'll probably never need to know, to listen carefully to the people who look as if they have nothing to teach me, to see school as something that goes on everywhere, all the time, not just in libraries but in parking lots, in airports, in trees. 

[...]

There's time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what's coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life. It's up to you to choose a life that will keep expanding. It takes discipline to remain curious: it takes work to be open to the world - but oh my friends, what noble and glorious work it is. Maybe this is the moment you shift from seeing What now as one more thing to check off the list and start to see it as two words worth living by. "

From What Now? By Ann Patchett

Love Is Really All That Matters

A group of Harvard researchers undertook a 75 year study to find the secrets to a fulfilling life. While the data they have collected has some limitations - it didn't include women, for starters, the Harvard Grant Study provides an unrivaled glimpse into a subset of humanity. The study followed 268 male Harvard undergraduates from the classes of 1938-1940 (now well into their 90s) for 75 years, collecting data on various aspects of their lives at regular intervals. And the conclusions are universal.

George Valliant, the Harvard psychiatrist who directed the study from 1972-2004 wrote a book (Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study) about it. But here are five lessons the Grant Study highlights.

#1 is "Love is Really All That Matters."

It may seem obvious, but that doesn't make it any less true: Love is key to a happy and fulfilling life. As Valliant puts it, there are two pillars to happiness. "One is love," he writes. "The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away."

Valliant said that the study's most important finding is that the only thing that matters in life is relationships. A man could have a successful career, money and good physical health, but without supportive, loving relationships, he wouldn't be happy ("Happiness is only the cart; Love is the horse").

From the article - "The 75-Year Study That Found The Secrets To a Fulfilling Life" by Carolyn Gregoire, The Huffington Post, August 11, 2013.

"But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great, ever came out of imitations."

"But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great, ever came out of imitations. What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

More difficult because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no mask to wear. Terrifying, actually, because it requires you to set aside what your friends expect, what your family and your co-workers demand, what your acquaintances require, to set aside the message this culture sends, through its advertising, it's entertainment, it's disdain, and it's disapproval, about how you should behave. 

[...]

'It is never too late to be what you might have been' by George Eliot "

From Being Perfect, by Anna Quindlen 

the pursuit of happiness

Christopher Gardner: It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?

The pursuit of happiness (movie)

"When people are willing to be brave and vulnerable."

"there’s not a talk I’ve seen where people really touch lives and made a huge difference where they were not excruciatingly vulnerable. The results that we see at TED, and the innovation, and the incredible music and the art is an expected outcome, in my opinion, of human potential when people are willing to be brave and vulnerable. The reason why this is so rare is not because of the human potential that’s here. It’s because of the willingness of the people who are here to be brave and vulnerable. We all have this capacity; it’s a bravery conference. There’s no one who’s up there, including myself, who hasn’t failed. And I seriously doubt there’s many people up there who haven’t been the subject of major, heartbreaking criticism."

Being vulnerable about vulnerability 

By Brene Brown

http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/16/being-vulnerable-about-vulnerability-qa-with-brene-brown/

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?utm_source=email&source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share

"an unexpected surprise"

Now this is creative in so many ways - from this source

To build and to destroy

"To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day."

Winston Churchill 

"Get a life."

"There are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit. But a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve gotten back the chest X ray and it doesn’t look so good, or when the doctor writes “prognosis, poor.”

[...]

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So I suppose the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you developed an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast while in the shower?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work."

[...]

Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you would have spent on beers in a bar and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Tutor a seventh-grader.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

[...]

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.

[…]

“Before” and “after” for me was not just before my mother’s illness and after her death. It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on, for the darkest possible reason.

And I went back to school and I looked around at all the kids I knew who found it kind of a drag and who weren’t sure if they could really hack it and who thought life was a bummer. And I knew that I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift."

From Brain Pickings article about Anna Quindlen's A Short Guide to a Happy Life

"Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined."

"Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours — long hallways and unforeseen stairwells — eventually puts you in the place you are now. Every choice lays down a trail of bread crumbs, so that when you look behind you there appears to be a very clear path that points straight to the place where you now stand. But when you look ahead there isn’t a bread crumb in sight — there are just a few shrubs, a bunch of trees, a handful of skittish woodland creatures. You glance from left to right and find no indication of which way you’re supposed to go. And so you stand there, sniffing at the wind, looking for directional clues in the growth patterns of moss, and you think, What now?"

Borrowing in part from great scientists and in part from great poets, Patchett advocates for embracing uncertainty as a positive force:

"Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined."

From Brainpickings article about Ann Patchett's book What Now?

Mask

Nowadays

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing"

Oscar Wilde 

"But you can't step into the same river twice."

"What I love most about river is: you can't step in the same river twice. The water's always changing, always flowing. But people, I guess, can't live like that. We all must pay a price. To be safe - we lose our chance of ever knowing, what's around the riverbend. Waiting just around the riverbend."

From the Pocahontas, "Just around the riverbend"

"Do you hear the people sing?"

"Take my hand, and lead me to salvation, Take my love, for love is everlasting, and remember the truth that once was spoken: to love another person is to see the face of god"

"Do you hear the people sing? Lost in the valley of the night. It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light for the wretched of the earth there is a flame that never dies, even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise. [...] Say, do you hear the distant drums? It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes!"

From the Les Miserables Finale song/ originally from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

"That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul"

"That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out. A creative writer, creative in the particular sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help feeling that in his rejecting the world of the matter-of-fact, in his taking sides with the irrational, the illogical, the inexplicable, and the fundamentally good, he is performing something similar in a rudimentary way to what [ two pages missing from the original document] under the cloudy skies of gray Venus."

"The Art of Literature and Commonsense" in Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov 1980

"The outcome of this war won't be decided tonight."

"We were talking about a cease fire, for Christmas Eve. What do you think? The outcome of this war won't be decided tonight. I don't think anyone would criticize us for laying down our riffles on Christmas Eve."

Joyeux Noel (2005)

"The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable."

"After several years reporting on the field of psychology as a journalist, I finally realized that there might be [a different possibility for one to reach happiness]. I began to think that something united all those psychologists and philosophers - and even the occasional self-help guru - whose ideas seemed actually to hold water. The startling conclusion at which they all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant effort to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with familiar, even learning if value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions - or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what 'happiness' really means."

From The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. By Oliver Burkeman. 

"There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change."

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake if intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers."

From The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. 

"Life is like riding a bicycle."

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you need to keep moving."

- Albert Einstein 

“If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be."

“If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be. And I never thought of the universe as one of scarcity. I always thought that there was enough of everything to go around — that there are enough ideas in the universe and enough nourishment.”

"There is no security in the world, or in life. I don’t mind living with some ambiguity and realizing that eventually, everything changes."

From How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman. Quote from Brianpickings article.

"People like clean, clear narratives, but the world is a messy andcomplicated place."

These stories can both be true

"People like clean, clear narratives, but the world is a messy and complicated place. No single theory or storyline is likely to explain something as big as a mass protest movement and political crisis."

From Washington Post article by Max Fisher, "There are two competing stories about what’s happening in Ukraine. They’re both right." February 21, 2014.

'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.'

"The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.' "


"Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems."

"Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it."

From Letters of Note: "Ladies and Gentleman of A. D. 2088" by Kurt Vonnegut

"The Real World is Not an Exam"

"From a medical point-of-view it is immensely frustrating — huge medical efforts dismantled by basic lacks. From a humanistic point-of-view it is heartbreaking and angering — how is it possible in this richest of countries that so many of our citizens go hungry? But from an economic point-of-view, it is simply insanity. A single hospital admission surpasses $10,000 before a patient so much as hiccups. A week of food to make it to the end of the month?"

From "When Doctors Give Patients Money" by Danielle Ofri, M.D.

"From more than one, I got exactly the same response. “How bad could he be?” they said with finality. “He passed his boards, didn’t he?” Of course, that final hurdle in the path out of training consists of nailing a gigantic quantity of single best answer questions."

From "The Real World is Not an Exam" by Abigail Zuger, M.D.

- Oh what a reality. 

"does the value of courage also depend on what the acts of courage are aimed at? And is the value if honor equally conditional?"

"Most men would agree that the value of loyalty depends in the object of loyalty. But does the value of courage also depend on what the acts of courage are aimed at? And is the value if honor equally conditional? The bravery of German soldiers who fought for their Fuhrer to the very last may seem meritorious if viewed in a narrow personal perspective as acts of sacrifice and human courage; but seen in a larger context this bravery merely prolonged one of the most criminal of regimes [Hitler's in. WW II]."

From "Patriots against 'traitors' " in  Every War Must End by Fred Charles Ikle 

"you can't ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event."

"Most days of the year are unremarkable. They begin and they end with no lasting memory made in between. Most days have no impact on the course of a life. [...] If Tom had learned anything... it was that you can't ascribe great cosmic significance to a simple earthly event. Coincidence, that's all anything ever is, nothing more than coincidence... Tom had finally learned, there are no miracles. There's no such thing as fate, nothing is meant to be. He knew, he was sure of it now."

Girl at Interview: Have I seen you before?
Tom: Me? I don't think so.
Girl: Do you ever go to Angela's Plaza?
Tom: Yes! That's like my favorite place in the city.
Girl: Yea, except for the parking lot.
Tom: Yeah, yeah I agree.
Girl: Yeah, yeah I think I've seen you there.
Tom: Really?
Girl: Yeah...
Tom: I haven't seen you?
Girl: You must not have been looking..
Tom: .....
Tom: My name's Tom.
Girl: Nice to meet you. I'm Autumn.

From 500 days of Summer (2009)

"Trust, then, is simply a bet, and like all bets, it contains an element of risk."

"Trust, then, is simply a bet, and like all bets, it contains an element of risk."

"When there’s ambiguity about how trustworthy he or she is, that sense of preexisting trust will burnish your view; it’ll blur the lines in an effort to push you toward continuing to trust. And, in reality, that’s not a bad thing. … Many instances of perceived untrustworthiness are errors or aberrations. Consequently, forgiveness is a great strategy."

Article from Brainpickings, about The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More by David DeSteno.

"If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn’t any rational consideration of its rightness for you"

"Consider any significant decision you’ve ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: a relationship you entered despite being dimly aware that it wasn’t for you, or a job you accepted even though, looking back, it’s clear that it was mismatched to your interests or abilities. If it felt like a difficult decision at the time, then it’s likely that, prior to taking it, you felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty; afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside? If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn’t any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but simply the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty."

Article from Brainpickings, about the book by Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (public library).

"You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish"

"You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish. This is a perfect day for bananafish."

"I don't see any," Sybil said.

"That's understandable. Their habits are very peculiar." He kept pushing the float. The water was not quite up to his chest. "They lead a very tragic life," he said, "You know what they do, Sybil?"

She shook her head.

"Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas. [...] Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door."

From "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger

"Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof"

Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like that's what you wanna do

Happy by Pharrell Williams

"You're what you own"

Don't breathe too deep, don't think all day
Dive into work, drive the other way
That drip of hurts, that pint of shame
Goes away, just play the game

You're living in America
At the end of the millennium
You're living in America
Leave your conscience at the tone

And when you're living in America
At the end of the millennium
You're what you own

The filmmaker cannot see
And the songwriter cannot hear
Yet I see Mimi everywhere
Angel's voice is in my ear

[...]

Dying in America
At the end of the millennium
We're dying in America
To come into our own

And when you're dying in America
At the end of the millennium
You're not alone
I'm not alone, I'm not alone

From "What you Own" Musical/Movie: Rent

"But I try to open up to what I don't know."

"Look, I find some of what you teach suspect, because I'm used to relying on intellect. But I try to open up to what I don't know. Because reasons says, I should've died three years ago." No other road. No other way. No day but today.

From "Life Support" Musical/Movie: Rent

"No one is still. Why such a fixation on speed?"

"A man or a woman suddenly thrust into this world would have to dodge houses and buildings. For all is in motion. [...] No one sits under a tree with a book, no one gazes at the ripples on a pond, no one lies in thick grass in the country. No one is still.

Why such a fixation on speed? Because in this world time passes more slowly for people in motion. Thus everyone travels at high velocity, to gain time.

[...]

Frustrated and despondent, some people have stopped looking out their windows. With the shades drawn, they never know how fast they are moving, how fast their neighbors and competitors are moving. They rise in the morning, take baths, eat plaited bread and ham, work at their desks, listen to music, talk to their children, lead lives of satisfaction.

Some argue that only the giant clock tower on Kramgasse keeps the true time, that it alone is at rest. Others point out that even the giant clock is in motion when viewed from the river Aare, or from a cloud."

From Einstein's Dreams: A novel by Alan Lightman

"lots of times you don't know what interest you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most."

Mr. Antolini: "You don't care to have somebody stick to the point when he tells you something?"

Holden: "Oh sure! I like somebody to stick to the point and all. But I don't like them to stick too much to the point. I don't know. I guess I don't like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in Oral Expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time - I admit it. [...]"

[...]

Mr. Antolini: "Don't you think there's a time and place for everything? Don't you think if someone starts out to tell you about his father's farm, he should stick to his guns, then get around to telling you about his uncle's brace?[...]"

Holden: "Yes - I don't know. I guess he should. I mean I guess he should've picked his uncle as a subject, instead of a farm, if that interested him most. But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interest you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. I mean you can't help it sometimes. What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. [...] I mean you can't hardly ever simplify and unify something just because somebody wants you to. [...]"

Chapter 24. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Somedays

From Open House for Butterfliesfrom Ruth Krauss

"People always think something's all true."

"People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act older than I am - I really do - but people never notice it. People never notice anything." 

The Catcher In the Rye

J. D. Salinger 

"To Love at all is to be vulnerable"

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

C.S. Lewis 

- Perhaps one day.

Comics from here.

Forrest Gump

"There is only so much fortune a man really needs - and the rest is for showin' off"

"Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

Forrest Gump (1994)

Life is

"Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it."

Charles Swindoll

"Where the Road Ends"

The Dish writes about Where the Road Ends  from the Atlantic

"Using Google Street View, we 'drove' thousands of miles around the world to find places where the road ends. Our virtual travels took us from the fields of Italy to the fjords of Norway and the tip of South Africa. This video was inspired by Alan Taylor's In Focus photo gallery, "The Ends of the Road," in the Atlantic Magazine."

Amateurs vs. Experts

"Amateurs are content at some point to let their efforts become bottom-up operations. After about fifty hours of training — whether in skiing or driving — people get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible.

The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, or focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau."

-  from Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, In "Debunking the Myth of the  10,000 - Hour s Rule: What actually Takes Place to Reach Genius-Level Excellence" in Brain Pickings, 

The Half-Finished Heaven

The Half-Finished Heaven

Despondency breaks off its course.

Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

by Tomas Tranströmer

J. D. Salinger

"How do you know you're going to do something, until you do it?"

"People never notice anything."

"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."

J.D. Salinger

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where –"
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.” 

“I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” 

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Success

The eight things you can do to be like the best:

1. Stay Busy
2. Just say NO
3. Know what YOU are
4. Build Networks
5. Create Good Luck
6. Have Grit
7. Make Awesome Mistakes
8. Find Mentors

From "8 things the world's most successful people all have in common"

The 8 rules for writing a good short story

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Kurt Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The link

"We see, but we do not see."

"We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders.

My deficiency is one of attention: I simply was not paying close enough attention. Though paying attention seems simple, there are numerous forms of payment. I reckon that every child has been admonished by teacher or parent to 'pay attention.' But no one tells you how to do that."

From On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz

"Nothing good gets away."

"And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."

Letter of Note: Nothing good gets away

From a letter John Steinbeck wrote to his eldest son, Thom, who asked for his advice on love and life. November 10, 1958.

Love don't die

"No matter where we go/ Or even if we don't/ And even if they try" 

The Fray. Love Don't Die

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JmzZjZ_seVI

Rescue

"She looks into the sky and all her tears are dry she kiss her fears goodbye. She’s gonna be alright. Things were bad. It was beyond repair. She was scare, she couldn’t handle it. Things were bad, but now she’s glad. Can’t you tell that she’s walking on air?"

Rescue - Yuna

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gTmFmEBeEog

Truth and Love

Edith Windsor

Brain Pickings

The photo