trifling matters

One way to get high blood pressure is to go mountain climbing over molehills.

-- Earl Wilson

fleetly float

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

-- George Bernard Shaw

it is to see, or to not

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.

-- Charles de Lint

born again

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

-- R.D. Laing

low and slow

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

-- David Leavitt

wonked out

Round the world and home again
That's the sailor's way
Faster faster, faster faster
There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining, is it snowing
Is a hurricane a-blowing
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of Hell a-glowing
Is the grisly reaper mowing
Yes, the danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing

-- Roald Dahl

tippytoes

There's a magical tie to the land of our home, which the heart cannot break, though the footsteps may roam.

-- Eliza Cook

inconsequentiality

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

-- Lewis Carroll

upon the embracing

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

-- John Updike

the loss of innocence

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

-- Howard Zinn

down in back

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

-- Pablo Picasso

walk this way

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.

-- Emily Bronte

look differently

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.

-- Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

left alone

You shouldn't be told you're completely irresponsible and be left alone with too much medication. It's too easy to forget. You take a couple of sleeping pills and you wake up in twenty minutes and forget you've taken them. So you take a couple more, and the next thing you know you've taken too many.

--  Judy Garland

i will wait for you

I feel that there is reason lurking in you somewhere, so we will patiently grope round for it.

-- Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.

in the end

The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

-- William Wordsworth

apple turnovers

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

-- George Bernard Shaw

impermanence

Don't take life too seriously. It's only a temporary condition.

-- Bill Knapp

you go on ahead

I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.

-- Mitch Hedberg

incoming

They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.

-- Dorothy Parker