• "And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

• "But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"

Mark Twain

• "We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

Charles Bukowski

• "Beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain."

David Levithan, Every Day

• "It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward."

Aldous Huxley, Island "The world is changed by your example, not your opinion." Paulo Coelho

• "The term “illegal immigrant” was first used in 1939 as a slur by the British toward Jews who were fleeing the Nazis and entering Palestine without authorization. Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel aptly said that “no human being is illegal.”"

Why ‘illegal immigrant’ is a slur - CNN.com

• "Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere."

Isabelle Eberhardt

• "The meaning of books lies before them and not behind: it is in us. A book is not a ready-made, terminal meaning, a revelation which we must undergo and assume; it is a reservoir of forms which receive their meaning; it is what Borges has calledthe imminence of a revelation which does not occur; it is an asymptote."

Richard Howard, “A Consideration of the Writings of Emily Dickinson”

• "Once, watching a snow squall/ move down the valley,/ a part of me lurched forward/ as if to go meet it. It was my skeleton/ imagining itself a long white ladder/ to the clouds of snow. You can tell/ a lot about the dreamer from the dream."

Chase Twichell, from “My Skeleton,” Green Mountains Review (vol. 25, no. 1, 2012)

• “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

Mary Oliver, from Don’t Hesitate