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Edward Lear's Parrots

defend joy as a destiny defend it from fire and firefighters from suicides and homicides from vacations and ruts from the obligation to be joyful

Our waking life is sometimes like a dream, which proceeds logically enough until the stimulus of some new sensation, from without or within, throws it into temporary confusion, or suspends its action; after which it goes on again, but with fresh characters, passions, and motives, and a changed argument.

Susie… come home… and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to… I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you… that the expectation… makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.

The milk, the blood, the rain. All our lives we perform tasks while waiting for something to click into place. For somewhere to put our love.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you.

Resist loss of the miraculous by lowering your standards for what constitutes a miracle. It is all a fucking miracle.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write... That is how civilizations heal.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility.