Daniel

“Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world so worthy of rescue.”
― Martha Postlethwaite

“Ego is like a room of your own, a room with a view, with the temperature and the smells and the music that you like. You want it your own way. You’d just like to have a little peace; you’d like to have a little happiness, you know, just “gimme a break!” But the more you think that way, the more you try to get life to come out so that it will always suit you, the more your fear of other people and what’s outside your room grows. Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. When you do go out, you find the experience more and more unsettling and disagreeable. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you just try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.”
― Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: How to accept yourself and others. A comprehensive self-improvement book for boosting your confidence and well-being

“A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth.

He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them.

But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger")”
― Charles Beaumont, Shock!

“Every ounce of bigotry, prejudice, intolerance, and hatred in the entire neighborhood was bubbling to the surface. Not everyone in the neighborhood was high on horse, but enough to light the spark. After that, mass hysteria, mob mentality, a primordial, tribal groupthink had taken over. Nothing galvanizes people like hatred. Small insignificant differences and divisions became insurmountable chasms, reasons to fight, kill, or die. Anyone who didn’t look like them, think like them, dress like them, worship like them, or vote like them, was now the enemy. Blood was being spilled in every direction I looked.”
― Wrath James White, And Hell Followed: An Anthology