"Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
~ Joyce

"Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
~ Dylan Thomas

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between the notes and curl my back to loneliness." ~Maya Angelou

"there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
a space
and even during the best moments
and the greatest times
we will know it
we will know it more than ever
there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
and
we will wait
and wait
in that
space."

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman." ~ Anais Nin

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." Anais Nin

"behind the quest burns aspiration,
a yearning for the heights
so intense
that ultimate failure,
even death itself,
though risked,
is no obstacle

and, as well,
you must come to know,
indeed must embrace,
the deepest, moist sorrow
of your heart.

fire and water,
the marriage of yearning and sorrow,
give birth to the quest."

"There are times when this feeling of devotion and dependence lies dormant....Then all at once this feeling awakes and surges and roars, as if the container would nearly burst. There's no room for anything else. My Mother. Dawn is within me and I feel
the approaching day. I am becoming something."
Paula Modersohn-Becker (1980)