Just because the road ahead is long, is no reason to slow down. Just because there is much work to be done, is no reason to get discouraged. It is a reason to get started, to grow, to find new ways, to reach within yourself and discover strength, commitment, determination, discipline.

The road ahead is long and difficult, and filled with opportunity at every turn. Start what needs starting. Finish what needs finishing. Get on the road. Stay on the road. Get on with the work.

Right now you’re at the beginning of the journey. What a great place to be! Just imagine all the things you’ll learn, all the people you’ll meet, all the experiences you’ll have. Be thankful that the road is long and challenging, because that is where you’ll find the best that life has to offer.

Ralph Marston

Take chances if you can handle the repercussions. You want to be an individual; can you handle it? Because it’s lonesome. That means not running with the pack. The pack don’t want you when you’re an individual. Pack wants you to be the pack. The phrase “to thine own self be true”: It’s real. But it’s hard.

Whoopi Goldberg, Glamour May 2010

She knows she’s lucky. She has good people around her. These people love her and care for her deeply. She has enemies, too. Which makes life all the more interesting. She indeed has the makings of an astounding and fulfilled existence. She acknowledges the fact that life has been good, and she’s been blessed. But it doesn’t mean that she cannot feel distressed, lonesome, and frustrated all the same. Losing her way has been her fault. This too, she acknowledges.

Guarantees? Who wants life with guarantees? Can you imagine life without the suspense and the hope and the change that takes place every day? The good surprises and even the bad ones?

وطني!!

كلمة يقشعر بدني عندما اسمعها
عواطف تختلج نفسي
واسئلة تروادني
هل وطني هو المكان الذي ولدت فيه
ام هو المكان الذي اعيش فيه
هل وطني هو الارض التي ابعدتني عنها
ام هو الارض التي استقبلتني
هل وطني هو عبارة عن ذكريات ماضية
ام هو الذكريات القادمة
والقائمة تطول و الاسئلة تتكاثر
و لا من اجوبة
وفي النهاية يستوقفني سؤال
تفوق حرقته حرقة كل الاسئلة السابقة مجتمعةً
هل حقاً لدي وطن؟؟

My Homeland!
A word that sends chills down my spine
Emotions that confound me
And questions that persist
Is my homeland the place where I was born
Or the place that I live in
Is my homeland the land that pushed me away
Or the land that welcomed me
Is my homeland just a collection of old memories
Or is it the memories in the making
And the list gets longer, and the questions multiply
But there are no answers
In the end, one question lingers
One burning more than all others combined
Do I really have a homeland?

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.


I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

[W]herever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

"outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass."

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.