#ding

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#building-blocks #earth #existence #life #molecules

There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU. ↗

— Pandora Gray

#life #reading #writing #life

Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#life #life

Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's? ↗

— Annie Dillard

#life

He used to annoy me with sophistry that we all chose our destiny. Then one day I told him that that’s great when fate offers you a nice set of destinies to choose from, but when you find yourself choosing between risking being raped, tortured and killed, or moving to another country to live like an alien without tongue, money or understanding, you are buggered either way. And that’s not even to mention how easily he could navigate through the mine filed of his mistakes... ↗

— Dunya Look

#truth-of-life #understanding-oneself-and-others #inspirational

Welcome to Book-a-holic Anonymous. Hi, I'm glyn and I addictive to the written word. I love the smell of the blackest ink sliding across lightly texture paper. My eyes squint against the lost of time within the pages of story. Sorry to say that I don't think there's a cure for my compulsion to lose myself within life and times of those characters bound between the covers. ↗

— g.k.griswold

#anonymous #book #book-a-holic #character #compulsion

Wedding Hymn Father, within Thy House today We wait Thy kindly love to see; Since thou hast said in truth that they Who dwell in love are one with Thee, Bless those who for Thy blessing wait, Their love accept and consecrate. Dear Lord of love, whose Heart of Fire, So full of pity for our sin, Was once in that Divine Desire Broken, Thy Bride to woo and win: Look down and bless them form above And keep their hearts alight with love. Blest Spirit, who with life and light Didst quicken chaos to Thy praise, Whose energy, in sin's despite, Still lifts our nature up to grace; Bless those who here in troth consent. Creator, crown Thy Sacrament. Great One in Three, of Whom are named All families in earth and heaven, Hear us, who have Thy promise claimed, And let a wealth of grace be given; Grant them in life and death to be Each knit to each, and both to Thee. ↗

— Robert Hugh Benson

#poems #wedding #death

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I’ve conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room. ↗

— Barry Lopez

#breathing #meditation #nature #reading #writing

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world...They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life. ↗

— John Connolly

#books #imagination #life #reading #stories

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played. ↗

— Lynne Sharon Schwartz

#reading #life