Thursday

Food for thought from "The Life all around me by Ellen Foster" by Kaye Gibbons:

When I told her I needed to lie there and feel like dirt a few more minutes, she said, I know you do.

Laura asked for nothing but the honor of having a girl like me, to look after and hold her daily conversations and customs with.

You can't make people behave, she said, by force of will, and you should try harder not to panic when things feel a little out of place.

He stopped walking and blurted out, If you think you're better than people like Mrs. Thumb, can you try to hide it harder so I can have a good time?

Then Laura said, The truth is not so bad, Ellen, that you need to create a story and worry yourself with it.

I've pulled myself out of many blue days just by saying I must be all right, there must be something right about me, if a person this rare and good chose me.

Tuesday

Food for thought from "Fear Nothing" by Dean Koontz:

I believe in the possibility of miracles, but more to the point, I believe in our need for them.

One thing I love about people is their ability to be lifted so high by the smallest drafts of hope.

How strange this world is: Those things that we can so readily touch, those things so real to the senses . . . are far less real than things we cannot touch or taste or smell or see. Bicycles and the boys who ride them are less real than what we feel in our minds and hearts, less substantial than friendship and love and loneliness, all of which long outlast the world.

Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless midnight of the mind.

Because I was not expected to survive to adulthood, my parents raised me to play, to have fun, to indulge my sense of wonder, to live as much as possible without worry and without fear, to live in the moment with little concern for the future: in short, to trust in God and to believe that I, like everyone, am here for a purpose; to be as grateful for my limitations as for my talents and blessings, because both are part of a design beyond my comprehension.

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love, which means that to live I must care not about what I am but about what I can become, not about the past but about the future, not even so much about myself as about the bright circle of friends who provide the only light in which I am able to flourish.