When did you discover your love of reading? I was “a natural” in that reading was a second reality — easy to slip into. I read a lot as a teenager, but my serious reading began in earnest around age 20. Serious as in quantity as well as attitude.
As an advocate of literacy, I try to provide resources to help people seeking information. In the extended entry are the links for the U.S. literacy sites.
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Speaking from experience (several bouts of clinical depression), I can guarantee that depression beyond the very mildest level (which makes you just miserable enough to stay home and finish the book rather than go out and have fun) destroys creativity–and that treating depression enhances it. Why? Well, depression doesn’t just make you miserable. When you’re depressed, you have no energy–and writing books takes hard work, which takes energy. When you’re depressed, you find it hard to start new things (like books, chapters, the day’s work), and hard to make decisions (like which book, or which character, or even which way Albert will turn when he leaves the throne room…) When you’re depressed, everything seems futile–you are sure the book will be lousy even if you do write it. When you’re depressed, you have less courage, less resilience, less ability to handle ordinary stressors. So…you can’t summon the energy or the courage to write…every little comment throws you back into your misery…and the next thing you know you’re in the midst of a full-fledged writer’s block.
–Elizabeth Moon, “The Writer and Depression” and author of notable science fiction/fantasy books
I just finished reading Life of Pi, a tale presented as a true-life survival story. I realize it’s a novel, but I want it to be true. It’s that compelling.
In fact, I might just decide to believe it as such. Certainly the story contains truth. People survive amazing ordeals. I like the protagonist very much — who couldn’t like a boy who just wants to love God, who is open to finding the divine in many ways? No, this is not just a novel. It is a true story.
People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.
–Audrey Hepburn
Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.
–Vaclav Havel
May your heart be an altar, from which the bright flame of unending thanksgiving ascends to heaven.
–St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Embrace the World
The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within the finite.
–Yann Martel, Life of Pi
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
–Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Gift-giving becomes so much more subtle as we age, often referencing a shared memory or simply a dear friendÂ’s insight into your personality that they have only been able to accumulate over the many years that theyÂ’ve known you.
–Nicole, of Auspicious Coincidence
When we’re writing, I’m not sure that we think of the reader. It’s more that we pray not to lie, to get it right, so that if we’re writing about a tree, we get that tree and not a petrified log…. Every poem is a prayer against loneliness. When I write, there are two people: the poem I’m writing and the poem that wants to be written. When I re-read what I’ve written, that makes three. If I read the poem to someone else that makes four. Poetry and prayer spell loneliness.
–Sharon Olds
People tend to think of nonviolence as a choice between using force and doing nothing. But the real choice takes place at another level. Nonviolence is less a matter of “not killing” and more a matter of showing compassion, of saving and redeeming, of being a healing community. One can only choose between doing good to the person placed in one’s path, or to do him evil. To do good is to love a person; but not to do that is as good as killing him. To love someone is to restore that person physically, socially, and spiritually. To neglect and postpone this restoration is already to kill.
–André Trocmé
Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.
–Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B
Whenever I drive past a church I’m often amused by the signage. Sometimes they are clearly clever on purpose; other times they are clever by accident. Often they are funny. My fiancé has wondered if anyone has compiled these in a book that ministers use for reference. Tonight I stumbled across a site that answers the question, and that answer is: yes. The site also has photos of signs submitted by various people. Some of my favorites:
Forgive Your Enemies. It Messes With Their Heads.
God So Loved the World That He Did Not Send a Committee.
Staying in Bed Shouting O God! Does Not Constitute Going to Church.
Walmart Is Not The Only Saving Place.
Can You Hear Me Now? How About Now? –God
Don’t Let Worries Kill You, Let the Church Help
See more at The Church Sign Generator page. You can also make your own signs there.
That’s what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
–Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (1969)
A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.
–Albert Einstein
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
–Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies,” The Simone Weil Reader (1977)
The following excerpt is from Heart & Soul: Living The Joy, Truth & Beauty Of Your Intimate Relationship, by Daphne Rose Kingma.
Integrate The Divine Erotic
Your erotic life, the expression of your sensuality in every dimension, is the mysteriously lovely vehicle for the integration of all that you are as a personality and a spirit. It is the sacred playground of physical passion, the point in our experience more than any other at which the material and spiritual intersect. Here the physical body becomes a temple of joy, of deeply rooted connections, of solace, of coming home.
Through sensuality, emotions are expressed in physical form. The body knows, feels, and teaches, eloquently and directly. When we are touched in exactly the right way, when making love is graceful and ecstatic, we are moved without words to a level of integration of body, mind, and spirit that can be instantly healing.
Because of the power of sexuality to heal the rift between our bodies and our souls, we all have a yearning toward it that is far stronger than what we can attribute to the physical sex drive alone. That is because deep inside we know that the erotic life can lead us to integration. And it is only people who are healed physically, emotionally, and sexually from the great raft of wounds we have all endured (if in no other form than our culture’s repression and perverted exaggeration of the erotic) who can be true vessels of compassion and approach the whole world with generosity.
Unfortunately, many of us have been unable to welcome our bodies, our innate sensuality, and the power of the erotic itself into the ken of the spiritual. We’re not even sure that we should, and yet like our sense of the spirit inside us, we do somehow vaguely understand that our erotic life, too, is divine.
If sexual energy and the joy it creates weren’t so awesome a power, no one would bother with it. Instead of being so focused on it, in so many forms, good and awful, we would have gone off to live quite comfortably without it. The truth is that sexuality is a light of such incredible brilliance that it draws the moths of darkness to it; and for this reason, if for no other, it is a spiritual responsibility that we integrate the divine and erotic in our lives.
In your grand quest for love, therefore, for the finest and most beautifully integrated becoming that your heart can entertain, do not overlook — indeed consciously seek — the sexual healing that will bring your personality and spirit into alignment with your body. For when we integrate our sexuality, claim it as the amazing gift it is, we not only heal ourselves and our partners, we help to restore the divine erotic to the entire world.
Now there are two ways to approach a subject that frightens you and makes you feel stupid: you can embrace it with humility and an open mind, or you can ridicule it mercilessly.
–Judith Stone, Light Elements: Essays in Science From Gravity to Levity (1991)
Be contented with what you possess in life; be thankful for what does not belong to you, for it is so much care the less; but try to obtain what you need in life, and make the best of every moment of your life.
–Hazrat Inayat Khan Gayan
Those Winter Sundays Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?–Robert Hayden (1913-1980)