“He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. Dad never was a money-maker, and, as nearly as I can make out, he never wanted to be. He worked mighty hard when he worked, but his real job was living.”
—Clarence Budington Kelland, 1927
“My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, ‘You’re tearing up the grass.’ ‘We’re not raising grass,’ Dad would reply. ‘We’re raising boys.’”
—Harmon Killebrew, 1984
Sometimes prayers collide and miracles are born.
Insanity is the sane mind surrendering to an insane world.
Grief is love expressed in tears.
We can’t really say anything about anything anymore without first washing it down to meaninglessness.
Be the dot on the exclamation point of life!
Much poetry happens in the silence
In Phoenix, summer is a heat bomb that explodes in late June.
Immediate grief is a falling to the knees, a bleeding of the heart, a blow to the soul. Ongoing grief is a getting up; a call to move on; a healing and strengthening; a melding of soul with sorrow, with loss, with life; a transforming of self to renewed being, rebuilt with the leavings of another.
My heart beat so hard when I was near him, I feared he could hear my secret longing for him.
journal, age fourteen
“Now this may sound nonsense, but that is merely because we are fools. There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), Apocalypse, 1931
Knowledge lives at the library, and the nice people there always let us take some home.
Heart pumps blood — and love, passion, hurt, joy, faith.