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I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes and speak our second-hand lines in this sad second-hand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.
and forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair
— kahlil gibran

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. And on a quiet day, if you really listen, you can hear her breathing.
— Arundhati Roy

I wish I was the weather, so you’d bring me up in casual conversation. And every time it rained I’d be the first thing on your mind.
we long intensely for more time - time to become whole, to recover the theft of meaning, to locate our coordinates in the world - but everywhere we look we find only the heartless fact of finitude.

You can be deeply certain, and slightly doubtful.
You can be scared, and really, really ready.
You can give it your all, and then give it over to the universe.

You can have everything to lose and everything to gain.
…I’m banking on it.
Love your doubts. Stay awake.
This is a state of love-filled delight in possibilities and eager joy at the prospect of actualizing them. Bright faith goes beyond merely claiming that possibility for oneself to immersing oneself in it. With bright faith, we are lifted out of our normal sense of insignificance, thrilled as we no longer feel lost and alone. The enthusiasm, energy, and courage we need in order to leave the safe path, to stop aligning ourselves with the familiar and convenient, arise with bright faith.
— Sharon Salzberg, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience

The painter is standing a little back from his canvas. He is glancing at his model; perhaps he is considering whether to add some finishing touch, though it is also possible that the first stroke has not yet been made. The arm holding the brush is bent to the left, towards the palette; it is motionless, for an instant, between canvas and paints. The skilled hand is suspended in mid-air, arrested in rapt attention on the painter’s gaze; and the gaze, in return, waits upon the arrested gesture. Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.
— The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences (via mfoucault)