Ava

If you’ve still got a nation of people sitting in front of screens, pretending, interacting with images rather than each other, feeling lonely and so needing more and more images, you’re going to have the same basic problem. And the better the images get, the more tempting it’s going to be to interact with images rather than other people. And I think the emptier it’s going to get.

I have endured. I have been broken. I have known hardship. I have lost myself. But here I stand, still moving forward, growing stronger each day.

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

“If anyone can refute me — show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective — I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.”

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

“Sometimes you are going to miss a person who was an almost to you. And feel sad because there is no name for that feeling. You just feel it in a way that makes you tired to your very bones.”

“I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Maybe that was how it was with all first loves. They own a little piece of your heart, always.