Lisa

“In any relationship, you may want to check whether you have understood the other person. If it is a relationship that is harmonious, in which communication is good, then happiness is there. If communication and harmony exist, it means mutual understanding is there. Don’t wait until the other person has left or is full of anger to ask the important question “Do you think I understand you enough?” The other person will tell you if you haven’t understood enough. He will know if you’re able to listen with compassion. You may say, “Please tell me, please help me. Because I know very well that if I don’t understand you, I will make a lot of mistakes.” That is the language of love.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communicating: Mastering Life's Most Important Skill Through Mindfulness, Personal Growth, and Effective Interpersonal Relations with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

“God isn’t good or evil, doesn’t favor you or hate you, and yet God is better partnered than fought.” “Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said. “All the more reason to care about myself and others. All the more reason to create Earthseed communities and shape God together. ‘God is Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay.’ We decide which aspect we embrace—and how to deal with the others.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they’re not what you thought they’d be. But you’d still do anything to keep them. Because you’d wanted them for so long.”
― Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me

“We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it. In other words, if we can really understand what we are looking for—that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it—we shall see that we do not want it at all. No one has to tell you that you should not hold your breath for ten minutes. You know that you can’t do it, and that the attempt is most uncomfortable.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity