Tag: quotes

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.

Algernon Blackwood

Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

Hurt people hurt people. That’s how pain patterns gets passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future.

Yehuda Berg

“The
importance of touch is that it places you. It is the medium of the
articulation of a relationship. Touch yields two different senses–that
of connection and that of separateness. It makes for a sense of oneness …
as well as for a sense of difference. One thing is sure: if we are not
touched, we might begin to suspect that we are not here.”
— Kathleen Woodword, Aging and its Discontents

“The longing to touch/be touched. I feel gratitude
when I touch someone—as well as affection etc. The person has allowed me
proof that I have a body—and that there are bodies in the world.”
— Susan Sontag, Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964 – 1980

“Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?”
— Ocean Vuong, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’

“While the skin appears to be the matter which
separates the body, it rather allows us to think of how the
materialisation of bodies involves, not containment, but an affective
opening out of bodies to other bodies, in the sense that the skin
registers how bodies are touched by others.”
— Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters

“There’s power in the touch of another person’s hand. We acknowledge it
in little ways, all the time. There’s a reason human beings shake hands,
hold hands, slap hands, bump hands. It comes from our very earliest
memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color,
deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space
without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied
with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes
that first horror, that original state of terror? The touch of another
person’s hands. Hands that wrap us in warmth, that hold us close. Hands
that guide us to shelter, to comfort, to food. Hands that hold and touch
and reassure us…”
— Jim Butcher, Skin Game

“Touch me, /  remind me who I am.”
— Stanley Kunitz, ‘Touch’

“I’m perfectly prepared to believe that the world is not only more
complicated than we know but than it is ever possible for us to know,
simply because we are limited as human beings by the capacities of our
sense organs. There could be incredible visual phenomena actually
occurring in this room right now which you and I simply can’t see—no
doubt they are occurring—because our retinas are only capable of
responding to a very short portion of the spectrum of light. The room
could be filled with angels, you know, dancing nude—and we wouldn’t know
it.”

Reynolds Price, from Conversations with Reynolds Price, ed. Jefferson Humpheries (University Press of Mississippi, 1991)

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry, from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” from The Country of Marriage (Harcourt, 1973)