Keep Track of Meaningful Quotes

The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds.
—William James

I like this image of the road of stories…

“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”
- Ella Fitzgerald
Wouldn’t it be nice if all it took was love and inspiration?

“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.”
Anne Lindbergh

Love doesn’t sit there like a stone.
It has to be made like bread;
Remade all the time,
...Made new

From The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. LeGuin

Bread and love, the daily necessities…I want to learn to make them well and often

At the center of all is Woman, and no thing is sacred (cooked, ripe, as the Keres Indians of Laguna Pueblo say it) without her blessing, her thinking. —Paula Gunn Allen

A powerful thought on the importance of thinking and blessing in the emergence of the sacred. I love the idea that the sacred has to do with cooking. Perhaps this applies to relationships also in that they can be “ripened” and made sacred by the way we think about them.

“children take up all the oxygen, don’t they?” From A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve.
Note to self—this happened when I tried to do stepchildren. Remind me not to try that again!

Lin Yutang:
“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”

Especially when time must be freed up to concentrate on a person who needs us, or when we need to take care of ourselves because life has become too busy or complicated, this quote is a relevant reminder.

“All you have to do, is decide what to do with the time that is given you.”
- Gandalf, Lord of the Rings
People who know what to do can be so admirable and attractive…

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner.”
- Stephen Hawking

If the greatest scientist of our age thinks that things happen for a reason, then I am in good company. I tend to feel the pattern in things; the weaving of a thread.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
- Carl Jung

So will we understand only that we are irritated? Or shall we decide that irritation is too small a thing to let come between another person and ourselves?