Will

“Sometimes a place to work, or a place to relax--even if only for an hour--is all you need. That, and good friends. Without those things, the city will break you into a million tiny pieces. But what in the world could be harder to find?”
― Aaron Cometbus, Mixed Reviews

“We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“On any given day, something claims our attention. Anything at all, inconsequential things. A rosebud, a misplaced hat, that sweater we liked as a child, an old Gene Pitney record. A parade of trivia with no place to go. Things that bump around in our consciousness for two or three days then go back to wherever they came from... to darkness. We've got all these wells dug in our hearts. While above the wells, birds flit back and forth.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“When I was ten, I read fairy stories 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.”
― Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis