Awards and banners I've received! Gah I'm so proud!

( I feel so vain )

"She's not Shimamoto, I told myself. She can't give me what Shimamoto gave. But here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair."


- Haruki Murakami

"She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round, pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that 'It isn't the same for them as it would be for us', and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her - understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe."


- 'The Road To Wigan Pier' by George Orwell

"I once watched a big man, a Marine, a man who if you passed him on the street you might believe didn't care for anything in the world, fall to his knees when my intern told him his cockatiel had inoperable brain cancer. It's ok for the people to cry in [the veterinary hospital]. More okay, I think, than over at the med center because here, there's nobody they have to be strong for. For years they have been jilted, cheated on, rejected, fired, and their pets have come to them and placed a warm nose on their thigh, a knobby three-toed claw on their shoulder. Would a dog ask his master not to cry over him? Would he ever misinterpret the grief?"


- 'Sight Hound' by Pam Houston

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”


- C.S. Lewis

"Happiness makes us pretty."


- Drew Barrymore

"We accept the love we think we deserve."


- The Perks of Being a Wallflower

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."


- Martin Luther King, Jr

"'Don't misunderstand me,' I said. 'Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centred end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.'"

- 'Flowers for Algernon' by Daniel Keyes

"When you really want something, the universe always conspires in your favor."


- "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho

"Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its' flame burns low."

- Henry Ward Beecher

"I must learn to love the fool in me--the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool."


- Theodore Rubin

"I'll write this all down for you," I said. "I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters."


- 'The Secret Life of Bees' by Sue Monk Kidd

"I remember love. It’s what I have to keep on reminding myself. It’s funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that’s why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It’s not the pain they’re getting over, it’s the love."


- "Jellicoe Road" by Melina Marchetta

"All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up."


- Pablo Picasso

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."


- Albert Einstein

Even after all these years, the Sun never says to the Earth
“You owe Me.”

Look what happens with a Love like that,
It lights the whole sky.


–Hafiz

"All the choices that any of us make...those things shape us. I took a pottery class once; the man who taught the class had been a potter all his life. The lines in his hands were permanently stained; his skin had absorbed the pigment of the clay. The ends of his fingers were wide, like the spade ends of shovels, shaped by running his fingers over clay on the wheel. What he did physically changed him, shaped him. Whatever we do, whatever we choose, it changes us, perhaps not leaving a visible sign as in the case of the old potter, but yes, I think that we are changed by what we do."


- "How To Make A Wave" by Lisa Hurst-Archer

"What did all this trauma teach me? Survival. And it really brings home something said to me in my youth: There are many ways to be crucified. Grandmother Ada taught me: If you live long enough you'll experience everything."


- "Adventures of a Psychic" by Sylvia Browne