heart shaped

"do i contradict myself? very well, then i contradict myself, i am large, i contain multitudes." ~ from song of myself - walt whitman

“i’ve always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies” - joy Harjo

"… become a divine exhibitionist. Play more, laugh more, do things that make your spirit roar, that amplify all your senses and encourage others to smile. Love boldly. Make your spirituality brighter, your prayers more colourful, your life more refined and reflective. Not only make the divine see you, but make the divine want to lick your forehead and taste you. After all, it’s not enough to merely notice the divinity in the oak tree or gorgeous sunset or in your feelings for your loved ones, or even in the mirror. You have to pray from such an honest and open and raw place in yourself that the divine eagerly wants to kneel at the alter of you.”
- Sera Beak

“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”  
― Susan Sontag

"The apocalypse has happened, my friends, and it's still happening.   Our task at hand is to bring about the end of the old world, but then to create something vital and shining and new.  Instead of four horses, we're riding in on brooms." - Pam Grossman

"This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed."
~ d.h.lawrence

"if he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. what i say to you i say to everyone: watch!"~ mark 13:36-37

i no longer wish to refrain from the errors of my fingers, the errors of my eyes. i know now that these errors are not just booby traps but curious paths leading towards a destination that they alone can reveal to me. there are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there. i shall contemplate these leaden faces, these hemp-seeds of the imagination. how beautiful you are in your sand-castles, you columns of smoke! new myths spring up beneath each step we take. legend begins where man has lived, where he lives. all that i intend to think about from now on is these despised transformations. each day the modern sense of existence becomes subtly altered. a mythology ravels and unravels." - from the preface to 'paris peasant' by louis aragon

"from heel to forehead, i am a block of blue sky." ~ edmond jabès, 'the book of questions II'

“i-i am going to be a storm-a flame- i need to fight whole armies alone; i have ten hearts; i have a hundred arms; i feel too strong to war with mortals-BRING ME GIANTS!” ~ cyrano de bergerac

"this tremendous world I have inside of me. how to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces…and rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me."— the diaries of Franz Kafka

"i am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and i thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ it’s dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t attain." — catherine breillat

"i cannot but think, ‘something wonderful may happen.’ it is not optimism, it is a rejection of self-pity (i hope) which leaves a loophole for life… i merely choose to remain living out of respect for possibility. and possibility is the great good.”-Frank O’Hara

"...but i have seen the beautiful. i know its contours and the rough guide it provides is blissfully specific: the hand that rides the ridge of the collarbone or moves along the brow, the perfect form of momentary light in this line or another. it’s what blake saw at the top of the stair, the terrible earthquake at the root of the flesh we think of as delight. it’s what you see when you shut your eyes and see, the angel with the whip or a flaming sword that burns your eyes down to the spinal cord, the shit, blood, semen smell of mortality you get used to because it follows you everywhere and is both beautiful and true." - from 'rough guide' by george szirtes

"what should i do about the wild and the tame? the wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. i want to be held. i don’t want you to come too close. i want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. i don’t want to tell you where i am. i want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. i want to be with you."— jeanette winterson

"i went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown for going out i found, was really going in." ~ john muir

“and we danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and we kissed too sweet, and threw our heads and howled just as loud as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day, looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.” — pearl cleage

“women are lush creatures. we are creation personified.” ~ clarissa pinkola estes

“identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. but at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? in the darkness or the twinkle?” ~ sergio chejfec, 'the planets'

"o thou to whom the musical white spring offers her lily inextinguishable, taught by thy tremulous grace bravely to fling implacable death's mysteriously sable rob from her redolent shoulders,thou from whose feet reincarnate song suddenly leaping flame flung, mounts, inimitably to lose herself where the wet stars softly are keeping their exquisite dreams - o love! upon thy dim shrine of intangible commemoration,(from whose faint close as some grave languorous hymn pledge to illimitable dissipation unhurried clouds of incense fleetly roll) i spill my bright incalculable soul." ~ e e cummings

"rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures." ~ henry david thoreau

"be well, I am seated beside you, planning a day's work. we are contending with the stuff of stones and stars, with water, air, with dirt, with food and with the sun's fire." ~ david ignatow

"why did i write it down? in order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it i wanted to remember? how much of it actually happened? did any of it? why do i keep a notebook at all? it is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. the impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. i suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. although i have felt compelled to write things down since i was five years old, i doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." ~ joan didion

"everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see." ~ rené Magritte

“admit it. you aren’t like them. you’re not even close. you may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. but it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences.
for every time you say club passwords like “have a nice day” and “weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “tell me something that makes you cry” or “what do you think deja vu is for?”. face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator.
but what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. trust your instincts. do the unexpected. find the others…” ~ timothy leary


"Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us - more range, more depth, more feeling; more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes also the outer world that selves create and share." ~ Jane Hirshfield