Life is too short to hold a grudge, also too long.
by Robert Brault

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
by The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky 

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
by C.S. Lewis

We live in a rural farm in India, don’t have a TV at home, and have bought our son a total of two toys. Most of his clothes are gifted by family and friends. He doesn’t eat cookies, chocolates, carbonated drinks, or fast food. He must be one miserable kid, right? If I say, ‘No,’ one might respond with, ‘Well, he doesn’t know what he is missing and he is being brought up in an extremely protective environment.’ Not true either. He knows the reasons and has willingly embraced them. His secret seems to be that everything has meaning for him. He is not chasing after anything and has no plans for tomorrow. He goes around as if he has an unlimited reserve of energy, curiosity, time, faith and willingness to be engaged with whatever and whoever comes his way. And he doesn’t seem to be bothered by being alone.
by Our 5-yr-old: Alone But Not Lonely

When I see you, the world stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There’s nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The world just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.
by James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (via compassio)

(via inmotels)

If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.
by Lemony Snicket (via slekes)

(via 6promises-deactivated20120417)

For everything in this journey of life we are on, there is a right wing and a left wing: for the wing of love there is anger; for the wing of destiny there is fear; for the wing of pain there is healing; for the wing of hurt there is forgiveness; for the wing of pride there is humility; for the wing of giving there is taking; for the wing of tears there is joy; for the wing of rejection there is acceptance; for the wing of judgment there is grace; for the wing of honor there is shame; for the wing of letting go there is the wing of keeping. We can only fly with two wings and two wings can only stay in the air if there is a balance. Two beautiful wings is perfection. There is a generation of people who idealize perfection as the existence of only one of these wings every time. But I see that a bird with one wing is imperfect. An angel with one wing is imperfect. A butterfly with one wing is dead. So this generation of people strive to always cut off the other wing in the hopes of embodying their ideal of perfection, and in doing so, have created a crippled race.
by C. Joybell (via ventriloquistic)

(via inmotels)

He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird.
by Audrey Niffenegger (via slekes)