What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You’ve Ever Read?

We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart.
My Antonia -Willa Cather

And the wonderful clear, pure air wells into
your lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations, and makes the eyes
bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune–or, rather, to an old tune;
for you remember in your boyhood something akin to this spirit of adventure,
this thirst for exploration, that now takes you masterfully
by the hand, plunges you into many a deep grove,
and drags you over many a stony crest.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

A quote by Gosling from The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
“I say that humans are the only ones that need everything within it. But there is nothing in this world that needs us for its survival. We aren’t the masters of the earth. We’re the servants.

“ The Pure and Simple Truth is Rarely Pure and Never Simple.”
Oscar Wilde.

I’m so late to this party. Oh, well.
It would be so hard to choose just one thing – but during this strange and lonely time, I keep coming back to this quote from Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan”:

“Just one friend?” said Rumfoord up in his treetop.
“Just one,” said Constant. His poor soul was flooded with pleasure as he realized that one friend was all that a man needed in order to be well-supplied with friendship.

My husband’s poem about his father.

To my father, a shade, a shadow of a shape,
No light can touch, only
Cast about the cavern of my mind
As I angle for what glimpse is left behind.
How can love be banished from the world
That depends upon it for all sense?
What reason can form where no love exists?
It wasn’t artifice, but something real
Slipped away now out of view, something fixed
That came undone with you.
A good man leaves a burden when he’s gone
The weight on others he no longer lifts.
The weak do know their weakness when the strong
Are released from the yoke the living share.
Your absence demands I stand and pull
Or be ground under in the trace.
I once followed in your steps
But your steps faded long ago.
I hardly see the line you left
I keep walking even so.
Is it that I am bereft?
Or is there something still inside?
A laugh I carry as a lamp
Something I felt in your embrace
Now others know in mine.
And what, when I am gone to mist,
Will echo down through time?
Only what you’ve given.
Only what I give.
Some spark of hope to spur the living,
In a cold world something kind.

“ I grow green beans in my garden. The one thing I know about harvesting them is that you need to train your eyes to see the beans. At first it all looks like leaves, until you see one bean and then another and another. If you want clarity, too, you have to look hard. You have to look under things and look from different angles. You’ll see what you need to when you do that. A hundred beans, suddenly.”
-Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

I am an avid reader of this blog and it is my first time to comment because after reading the comments (not all though) I still haven’t read someone shared a quote from the book A Man Called Ove. Here’s my favorite from the book.

“To love someone is like moving in a house. At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”

I hope that’s what you get too, Happily Ever After. A bit of sully in your sweet. Not perfection, but real love. Not what you imagine, but what you’d never dream. – Cheryl Strayed

My mom died very suddenly and unexpectedly in August, just as my son turned 3 months old, and I’ve been simultaneously reading for clues and then desperately avoiding things about death. I keep returning, among other wisdoms/wishes to this poem by Raymond Carver:

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved
on the earth.



“He kissed her cheek and then she knew that you could become homesick for people too.”

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri is one of my favorite books, specifically the story A Temporary Matter. I would hate to ruin the story for anyone, so I will just put the last line: “They wept together, for the things they now knew.”

And the poem Good Bones by Maggie Smith:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent relator,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. — Emerson

I think this quote sums up character in such a beautiful way. I’ve never struggled much with “peer pressure”, but have at times found it difficult to speak my truth when I know it diverges from that of the person/ people I’m speaking to. Finding the words and actions to do this without alienating others or sounding preachy is something I strive for!

I also love this poem:
http://www.fleurdelis.com/desiderata.htm

It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.
How wild it was, to let it be.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Tra

I think quite frankly that the world does not care for complicated women. The ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated. The ones who are so intriguing that new men fall in love with them every day. At every meal where there’s a waiter, in every taxi, in any instance when someone can get to know them just a little bit. Just enough to get completely gone. But most men in the end don’t have the stomach for that much person. – Elizabeth Wurtzel

‘You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.’
— Turtles All The Way Down, by John Green

On love:
Love can feel like it’s saved your life. More than food, you know, it’s like water. -Dave Matthews

On grief:
He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.
Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Dead

On gratitude:
Thank God he was sitting. He said. With his feet up on a rubber hose half facing a morning glory. The last or the first. And thanks for the ledge to put my coffee cup on. He said. -Gerald Stern

I first read this poem after the loss of my beloved grandmother and it has given me such comfort and encouraged me to keep mentioning her:
“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

― Henry Scott Holland, Death is Nothing at All

“He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“So, what if, instead of thinking about solving your whole life, you just think about adding additional good things. One at a time. Just let your pile of good things grow.” – Rainbow Rowell

Read this recently and it’s my mantra for 2020. To just let the good things grow.

All the Light We Cannot See:
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”

Secret Garden:
“She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind.”

“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun–which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone’s eyes.”

?Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”
Kahlil Gibran

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
– The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person—what we felt about that person.” – Goodbye, Vitamin, Rachel Khong

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste.”
– Call Me by Your Name, Andre Aciman