Here is the world

Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid...

[literarylines]

When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

“When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver

[literarylines]

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

- Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

[literarylines]

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Song of Myself 51, Walt Whitman

[literarylines]

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

-Audre Lorde, “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”

[literarylines]

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

[literarylines]

It will be the past. We'll all go back together. Everyone we ever loved,
and lost, and must remember. It will be the past. And it will last forever.

“Heaven" by Patrick Phillips, from Boy

[literarylines]

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind.

Jazz by Toni Morrison

[literarylines]

You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

[literarylines]

Some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

[literarylines]

I love myself. The quietest, simplest, most powerful revolution ever.

Salt by Nayyirah Waheed

[literarylines]

Come back! Even as a shadow...even as a dream.

Herakles by Euripides

[literarylines]

I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, ‘Ah, I wish I was not good to that person.’ You will never think that. I should have been more kind.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

[literarylines]

Just because you are soft doesn't mean you are not a force. Honey and wildfire are both the colour gold.

Edge of Wonder: Notes from the Wildness of Being by Victoria Erickson

[literarylines]

He loved her, and until he’d loved her…she had never minded being alone.

— Summer Crossings by Truman Capote

[literarylines]

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance. One cannot fly into flying.

— Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

[literarylines]

One day I will forgive you. Until then, there are scabs everywhere that you have touched me.

— The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia

[literarylines]

I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as the Candle in The Dark by Carl Sagan