lost & hollow

You always have the option of having no opinion.

One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found - and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is.

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing really counts at all.

The boys whistled at me. Some stood up and trotted towards me for a better view. The women also stopped when I passed. I paid no attention to the whistles and shouts. In fact, I didn't listen. I was enveloped in a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who didn't belong to anyone. The other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew who it belonged to. It belonged to the ocean and the sky, to the whole world.

One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.

You can't expect respect from others when you don't first respect yourself.

The second half of man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he acquired during the first half.

He who comes to the mirror to change himself has already changed.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, 'This is me and the world be damned!' Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society.

In the marginalia...we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly - boldly - originally - with abandonment - without conceit.

All my life I've liked weeds. Weeds are botanical poets, largely unwanted. You can't make a dollar off them.

Am I as old as I am? Maybe not. Time is a mystery that can tip us upside down. Yesterday I was seven in the woods, a bandage covering my blind eye, in a bedroll mother made me so I could sleep out in the woods far from people. A garter snake glided by without noticing me. A chickadee landed on my bare toe, so light she wasn’t believable. The night had been long and the treetops thick with a trillion stars. Who was I, half-blind on the forest floor who was I at age seven? Sixty eight years later I can still inhabit that boys body without thinking of the time between. It is the burden of life be many ages without seeing the end of time.

Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

I've had times I've felt like I was drowning. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see. But somehow, I always kept one finger above water...and because of keeping that tiny bit of hope when nothing was going my way, something always came along and pulled me out. You must hold on, even just a little. I know it's hard, but something is gonna change.