Starting a new series sharing my favorite quotes and passages from books I’ve read (plus some graphics I designed that you can feel free to share on socials if you feel inclined to do so1). I truly believe that books and literature come to you exactly when you need them so I hope some of these resonate.
“The ship of my life may or may not be sailing on calm and amiable seas. The challenging days of my existence may or may not be bright and promising. Stormy or sunny days, glorious or lonely nights, I maintain an attitude of gratitude. If I insist on being pessimistic, there is always tomorrow. Today I am blessed. “
“I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
-Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge men who have not been denied cannot know.
I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it's a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases —a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last.
-Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Those who seek security chase it for a lifetime without ever finding it. It remains elusive and ephemeral, because security can never come from money alone. Attachment to money will always create insecurity no matter how much money you have in the bank. In fact, some of the people who have the most money are the most insecure.
The search for security is an illusion. In ancient wisdom traditions, the solution to this whole dilemma lies in the wisdom of insecurity, or the wisdom of uncertainty. This means that the search for security and certainty is actually an attachment to the known.
And what's the known? The known is our past. The known is nothing other than the prison of past conditioning. There's no evolution in that — absolutely none at all. And when there is no evolution, there is stagnation, entropy, disorder, and decay.
Uncertainty, on the other hand, is the fertile ground of pure creativity and freedom. Uncertainty means stepping into the unknown in every moment of our existence. The unknown is the field of all possibilities, ever fresh, ever new, always open to the creation of new manifestations.
-Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
“To defend oneself against a fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one's wits, it is just not true that one can live by them—not, that is, if one wishes really to live.”
“To be sensual, I think is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. “
“…A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
“ It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.”
“It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant-birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so-and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths-change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.”
-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
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With love,
LaChelle
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please tag me on IG at @lachellerising if you do share :)