volume 1

"I stood lonely enough : but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed; it did not oppress me much...I delivered myself up to the employment of watching and thinking."

"If I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this would have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted the separation; that wind would then have saddened my heart; this obscure chaos would have disturbed my peace: as it was I derived from both a strange excitement, and reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise to clamor."

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain, - the impalpable principle of light and thought."

"You think too much of the love of human beings...besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognise our innocence."

"The restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it--and certainly they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement which, while it swelled it in trouble, and expanded it with life; and best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended--a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence."

"On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momentarily: she looked over Hay, which half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear too felt the flow of currents.."

"I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house - from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me - to that sky expanded before me, - a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth; the clock struck in the hall; that sufficed; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-door, and went in."

"In time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high."

-Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre

A Love Song

What have I to say to you
When we shall meet?
Yet—
I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

See me!
My hair is dripping with nectar—
Starlings carry it
On their black wings.
See, at last
My arms and my hands
Are lying idle.

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

-William Carlos Williams

thank you

“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.”

“The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.”

"It's a complete lie, why do people buy these papers? It's not the truth I'm here to say. You know, don't judge a person, do not pass judgment, unless you have talked to them one on one. I don't care what the story is, do not judge them because it is a lie."

“Let us dream of tomorrow where we can truly love from the soul, and know love as the ultimate truth at the heart of all creation.”

“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”

all so true.

-Michael Jackson

what's really there

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

e. e. cummings

yes

"This world's no blot for us, / Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good."

-Robert Browning

connection

“Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?”

“'Tis not too late to seek a newer world”

“I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move”

“No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.”

"I am a part of all that I have seen."

"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."

"Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within."

-Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Close observation of a single subject, whether it is as tiny as Pasteur's microbes or as great as Einstein's universe, is the kind of work that happens less and less these days. Glued to computer and TV screens we have forgotten how to look at the natural world, the original instructor on how to be curious about detail.”
-Jennifer New

findings

"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlaying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle."

"We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me."

"As there was full an hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again, now waking up uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now making thunder of the wind in the chimney; at length falling off into a profound sleep from which the daylight woke me with a start."

-Great Expectations-