My worst habit is I get so tired of winter I become a torture to those I’m with.
If you’re not here, nothing grows. I lack clarity. My words tangle and knot up.
How to cure bad water? Send it back to the river.
How to cure bad habits? Send me back to you.
When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean.
There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can’t hope.
The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.
Look as long as you can at the friend you love, no matter whether that friend is moving away from you or coming back toward you.
‘My Worst Habit’ by Rumi
Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters.
Heraclitus
‘True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.’ Well, who was your best friend, if not God, and what did you really need to say to Him or He to you when you both already knew the most and only important thing, which was that you would always be there for each other.
From ‘Hideaway’ by Dean Koontz
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop. The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be.
From ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ by Barbara Kingsolver
We move in the same mental spaces. In some of our dreams we wander the same streets, trying tom get back to the same house. One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
Phyllis Rose
But that is the way we are made: we don’t reason, where we feel; we just feel.
From ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ by Mark Twain
Don’t let your throat tighten
with fear. Take sips of breath
all day and night, before death
closes your mouth.
Rumi
May those who love us love us; and those who don’t love us, may God turn their hearts. And if He cannot turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles so that we may know them by their limping.
From the movie ‘Keeping the Faith’
My dear children…you must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in after years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some fine, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if we have only one good memory left in our hearts, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.
From ‘The Brothers Karamazov’