“Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American
institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge
if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from
8:00 PM to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness,
I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads
and courts- it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that
Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear, and freshly mowed.
Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements,
Madame Bovary, the sexual reproduction of a sunflower for example,
with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls,
the silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators,
and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled,
Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would
understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing
discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths
and darkness, reticent and unfeeling, as darkness always was.”

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Never respond to an angry person with a fiery comeback, even if he deserves it...Don't allow his anger to become your anger.”
― Unknown

“Never be angry with something that can't get angry with you.”
― Jack Gardner


“Patience is the direct antithesis of anger.”
― Allan Lokos,

I so need to go to Greece someday...
 

ITHACA

As you set out for Ithaca
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:
you’ ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
and this is the meaning of Ithaca.

Author : Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis

From a friend's FB page...
 

the Great Soul knows
 

I Cannot Live With You/////

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to —
Putting up
Our Life — His Porcelain —
Like a Cup —

Discarded of the Housewife —
Quaint — or Broke —
A newer Sevres pleases —
Old Ones crack —

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down —
You — could not —

And I — Could I stand by
And see You — freeze —
Without my Right of Frost —
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise — with You —
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus' —
That New Grace

Glow plain — and foreign
On my homesick Eye —
Except that You than He
Shone closer by —

They'd judge Us — How —
For You — served Heaven — You know,
Or sought to —
I could not —

Because You saturated Sight —
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be —
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame —

And were You — saved —
And I — condemned to be
Where You were not —
That self — were Hell to Me —

So We must meet apart —
You there — I — here —
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are — and Prayer —
And that White Sustenance —
Despair —

~Emily Dickinson

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. " - Unknown

“What barrier is there that love cannot break?”
― Mahatma Gandhi



“I love you for who you are, not who the world thinks you should be.”
― Libba Bray