“Yet I never sought what is real, yearned for the real, but rather I have yearned for dreams more than solid things. I can say I love the textures of dreams. The way they hover and almost taste. The clouds and darkness that linger behind, mostly unseen. And the palette of dreams. You can almost taste the colours, they seem as words on the tip of the tongue, unsayable as pomegranate seeds, unsayable as thick cream, the darkness of such a thick cream. This is why I am obsessed with dreams. They know what we cannot. Night after night they try and tell us the impossible. Dreams are secret and closed, and also contain everything, gushing, splayed open. Dream suitcases, carpetbags, hold-alls. They influence us secretly and they draw me to travel to nowhere, to beauty’s passage, through halls of mirrors where I know I am not myself, I know I am sublime. ”
― Shawna Lemay

“How to recognize what is real? To know the layers and depths of oneself, to know how to open, to know how to fill a capacious hold-all, to know one’s own quirks and nervous twitches, cravings and transparencies, and, above all the force, literally the force, of events, connections, the wild calm in every thing. ”
― Shawna Lemay

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
― Howard Thurman

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James