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Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing—the reason they can fly.
So, be slow if you must, but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved, deeply and without patience. Let God and the world know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.
A dog lives fifteen years, if you’re lucky.
A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them.
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in
If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics. He’s the forest, He’s the desert. He’s the ice caps, that are dying. He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.
What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen.
Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless.
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished.
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk! To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is the mystery, which is death as well as life, and not be afraid! To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome with amazement!
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.
and when has happiness ever required much evidence to begin its leaf-green breathing?
