I enjoyed When a Monster Calls, so I decided to try this one.

"What was true, though, and what he thought about often, was that although he was the hero of his version of the story, naturally, he was also a supporting player in this same story when it was told by someone else."

"There were as many truths -- overlapping, stewed together -- as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew."

"It just felt like she'd been born with a small flaw, right at the centre of herself, a flaw somehow too shameful to be shown to anyone else, so she'd spent her life building a carapace around it to keep it hidden. Inevitably, the carapace became her true self, a fact she could never quite see, a fact that might have offered relief. Because all she knew was the truth deep inside of her, the little something wrong no one else could ever, ever know. And if that wasn't the real her, then what was? At her core, she was broken, and life was just one long attempt to distract people from noticing."

"You fight your hatred for yourself, anyone can see, and you do your best, taking it out on people who you think will be strong enough to handle it. I understand this. I am the same. It is hard but it is bearable if your love for me is bigger than your hate. But it has tipped somewhere along the way, and there is no recovery from that, I do not think."

"'The point of a volcano is anger, ' he says. 'A calm volcano is merely a mountain, it is not? To calm a volcano is to kill it.'
Lava and heat and destruction flow from him in waves, the denizens of this young earth fleeing before his burning laughter. She flies away in distaste, before circling around again to confirm her distaste. Then circling around again.
'The purpose of a volcano is to die, my lady,' says the volcano, 'but as angrily as possible.'
'You do not seem angry, ' she says. 'You smile. You jest. You speak from desire, from flirtation. I have seen it the world over.'
'I speak from joy, my lady. Angry joy.'
'Is such a thing possible?'
It is that which creates us all. It is that which fires the magma of the world. It is that which drives the volcano to sing.'"

"'A story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself,  even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, a story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us.'"

"'George is nice, but he's nice all the way through. I need someone who'll push back or I'll just turn into a bully, and who wants that?'"

"Pregnancy didn't just happen in your womb; your whole body re-arranged itself, like country-house staff preparing for a visit from royalty."

"'We are all the lady, George. And  I am your crane and you are mine.' She sighed. 'And we are all the volcano. Stories shift, remember? They change depending on who is doing the telling.'"

I listened to this one twice while I borrowed it from the library. No quotation marks because I'm not sure I'm captured in direct quotes properly. But these are the notes I took as I listened.

Good writing is about telling the truth.

Writing is mindfulness - being present.

Write as much as fits in a one inch picture frame. One encounter. Just deal with what's right in front of you - a 1 inch piece of a story to tell.


Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism while messes are the artists true friend.

Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others.

If you start to look around, you will start to see. When what we see catches us off guard and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible it offers hope.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it. Get quiet and listen. It's hard to stop controlling, but you can do it.

Great words from Richard Rohr in his daily email:

"Religion is not about heroic will power or winning or being right. This has been a counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history. True growth in holiness is a growth in willingness to love and be loved and a surrendering of willfulness...."

"Doing anything and everything solely for God is certainly the most purifying plan for happiness I can imagine. It changes the entire nature of human interaction and eliminates most conflict. "

*Spoiler alert...kind of: I'm not revealing any plot here, but I did want to capture several favorite passages. This well-timed read caught me in a vulnerable and available space and captured so much of what I've felt and experienced in a hauntingly accurate way.

"But the good thing about ideas is that they grow other ideas."

"All he could feel, all he had felt since the monster revealed itself, was a growing disappointment. Because this wasn't the monster he was expecting. 'So come and get me then,' he said."

"It tasted as unhappy as it looked."
     
"Conor wasn't stupid. When they'd had the 'little talk' the next day, he knew what his mum had done and why she had done it. But that didn't take away from how much fun that night had been. How hard they'd laughed. How anything had seemed possible. How anything good could have happened to them right then and there and they wouldn't have been surprised."

"The justifications of men who kill should always be heard with skepticism."

"There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between."

"For a moment, all Conor could see was sudden thunderstorms on the way, could feel them ready to explode in the sky and through his body and out of his fists. For a moment, he felt as if he could grab hold of the very air and twist it around...."

"And people began to live on earth rather than within it."

"The parson, though, what was he? He was nothing. Belief is half of all healing. Belief is the cure, belief in the future that awaits. And here was a man who lived on belief, but who sacrificed it at the first challenge, right when he needed it most. He believed selfishly and fearfully."

"Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect."

"As incredible as it seemed, time kept moving forward for the rest of the world. The rest of the world wasn't waiting."

"'You be as angry as you need to be,' she said. 'Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, nor your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard.' .... 'And if, one day,' she said really crying now, 'you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have you to know, Conor, you have to know that it was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud. All right?'"

"'You must speak the truth and you must speak it now.... Say it. You must.'
'It'll kill me if I do,' he gasped.
'It will kill you if you do not,' the monster said. 'You must say it.'"

"And the fire in Conor's chest suddenly blazed, suddenly burned like it would eat him alive. It was the truth, he knew it was. A moan started in his throat, a moan that rose into a cry and then a loud wordless yell and he opened his mouth and the fire came blazing out, blazing out to consume everything, bursting over the blackness, over the yew tree, setting it ablaze along with the rest of the world, burning it back as Conor yelled and yelled, and yelled in pain and grief - And he spoke the words. He spoke the truth."

"Conor's grief was a physical thing, gripping him like a clamp, clenching him tight as a muscle. He could barely breathe from the sheer effort of it, and he sank to the ground again, wishing it would just take him once and for all."

"The answer it that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times a day....Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both.
'But how do you fight it?' Conor asked, his voice rough. 'How do you fight all the different stuff inside?'
'By speaking the truth,' the most said. 'As you spoke it just now.'"

"'You do not write your life with words,' the monster said. 'You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.' There was a long silence as Conor re-caught his breath.
'So what do I do?' he finally asked.
'You do what you did just now,' the monster said. 'You speak the truth.'
'That's it?'
'You think it is easy?' The monster raised two enormous eyebrows. 'You were willing to die rather than speak it.'
Conor looked down at his hands, finally unclenching them. 'Because what I thought was so wrong.'
'It was not wrong,' the monster said, 'It was only a thought, one of a million. It was not an action.'"

"'If you speak the truth,' the monster whispered in his ear, 'you will be able to face whatever comes.'"

A few favorite bits from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green....

p33 "My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn't like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it totally fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then are are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal."

p157 "'Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.'"

p305 "I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again."

Pics taken yesterday morning upon arriving at work. 

 6:15:08 am

 6:18:10 am

 6:19:25 am

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 6:20:54 am

Pics taken yesterday morning upon arriving at work. 

Welcome Morning

by Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

"Welcome Morning" by Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. © Mariner Books, 1999.

Some great thoughts from Dick Van Dyke's memoir: My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.

"I had a long-term vision in mind. One of an actor's biggest challenges, perhaps his or her most important, is choosing the right role. I knew that having a well-defined standard would ultimately help my representatives find the right materials, and if they did their jobs right, and I did mine, ultimately the material would define me in a way that would make me comfortable for the rest of my career." (p111)

"The show might have been better if we'd been of differing opinions, but I agreed with his thesis that God was not an all-powerful 'cosmic superhuman' looking down from the penthouse as much as He was Love. The bishop put it more eloquently in his book when he wrote, 'Assertions about God are in the last analysis assertions about Love.'" (p163)

"A few years ago I told Esquire magazine that the Buddhists boiled it down to the essentials. They said you need three things in life: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. The message does not get any clearer. I heard Walt Disney, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Carl Reiner all say the same thing in their own way. Hope is life's essential nutrient, and love is what gives it meaning. I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning." (p270)