The Unfettering

A commonplace book for inspiration and aspiration. Quotes | Poems | Pictures | Etc.

[constancevigilant]

Tell your stories. Work with people that inspire you. The endgame is a mirage. It's the miles in-between where the real art & love happens.

~Me to a friend about her playwriting struggles, ages ago. It popped up in my FB Memories today, on a day I needed to hear it, too.

[constancevigilant]

You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.

~Jeannette Rankin

[constancevigilant]

In countries descending into authoritarianism, one of the first things to go is the right to assemble. Why? Because of what can happen when people come together, exchange information, inspire one another, test out new ways of being together.

~Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering

[constancevigilant]

Why, courage then! what cannot be avoided 'Twere childish weakness to lament or fear.

~Margaret to the red-rose soldiers in Shakespeare's Henry VI part 3

[constancevigilant]

Love isn't a cure all, it's just a starting point.

~Leif from Midnight Burger S1e3, written by Joe Fisher

[constancevigilant]

I hope you cross paths with the quiet realization that some doors must close for you to breathe fully.

~Alex Elle (via Substack)

[dnschmidt]

Ye Olde Social Media

Dearest Sir,

I am writing to express my sincere thanks for your earlier witty bon mot. How often your urbane humor brightens my day like sunshine upon my beard! I have "reposted" your jocularity on the bulletin board at the general store.

Perhaps one day some industrial wizard will invent a system to spread japes and jests via carrier pigeon or even hot air balloon! Ah, but such thoughts are a mere flight of fancy. A man can dream, though. A man can dream.

Yours,

Jedidiah Q. Oldentimes

[constancevigilant]

How do we refrain from hating other people even as we fight fiercely against the hatred and danger they have helped unleash?

~Rob Brezsny

[constancevigilant]

Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

~from This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

[constancevigilant]

Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations.

~from The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

[constancevigilant]

Out there, in the fields and wood, on the moor and in the hedgerows, there are old gods, old ghosts, and old ways. People like us—women who wear trousers—we’re not always welcome there.

~from Through a Darkening Glass, by R.S. Maxwell

[constancevigilant]

[constancevigilant]

Today, My Hope is Vertical

by Jane Hirshfield

Today, my hope is vertical. Tomorrow it will be horizontal. The next day, cloudy. My hope is like a Greek myth: exchanging skin for bark, bark for scales, scales for the hollow bones of a bird. In these ways my hope attempts to escape its fate. In myth, hope surely knows, escape is useless. Still, hope will try. I, who will someday leave behind this three-dimensioned puzzle, pity my hope. Poorling, I say to my hope, even I cannot spare you, even I cannot make you mortal. Winged, rooted, finned, roofed or roofless, of all my shapes, only you, hope, know nothing of irony, only you cannot be cynical or cloak yourself in the objectivity of grammar. Only you cannot suffer suffering. You exempt, you deny, you protest with speech and with silence. You forgive—helpless to not— in speech and in silence. I, citizen of perspective, born into the tribe of time, will vanish into its blurring distance. But you—most intransigent, most stubborn of all my parts— will be forced to continue. How tenderly, with two open hands, you reach again today for hunger's apple.

{from the April 8, 2024 print edition of The New Yorker}

[constancevigilant]

For most of history, music has been a rare thing. Every performance was fleeting. Constant access to music appears in descriptions of heaven.

~from A Taxonomy of Background Music (Sep 16, 2024) by Dayten Rose in DIRT MEDIA

A Taxonomy of Background Music

Making sense of one hundred years of noise.

[constancevigilant]

Resting is not a reward for success. It’s a prerequisite for performance.

~Melody Wilding

[constancevigilant]

[constancevigilant]

Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone."

~William James