It could have been different for her. She could have married for money. She could have married for anything she wanted. But she’d married for love, and this is the sort of sweet trouble that comes from that decision. It puts optimism in the hearts of the innocent. It coos to them in the twilight. It promises moons in their pockets. It convinces them anything is possible. It leads them into the thick of disorder with only each other to find a way out.

David Giffels, All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House

From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to Heaven. And when two souls are destined for each other and find each other, their streams of light flow together and a single brighter light goes forth from their united being. 

Baal Shem Tov

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.

Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

Though I know I’ll never lose affection
For people and things that went before.
I know I’ll often stop and think about them.

The Beatles, “In My Life”

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

Søren Kierkegaard

It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us. Even an intimate human friend is ill-used if we talk to him about one thing while our mind is really on another, and even a human friend will soon become aware when we are doing so.

C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

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