Name

The individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is literally to be spellbound.
--Alan Watts

Spellbound

The individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is literally to be spellbound.
--Alan Watts

Loss

Perfectionism is a form of being terrified of, and what follows that of is a blank every perfectionist would probably fill in differently, but whose large, generalizing term may be loss.
--Elizabeth Tallent

Effective

All your experiences are effective if you act with love.
--Yoko Ono

Not the same

The whiteness of the page before it is written on and after it is erased is and is not the same white, and the silence before a word is spoken and after is and is not the same silence.
--Rebecca Solnit

Capable

Every moment you are privileged to draw a breath in this life, you are capable of change. And you are capable of learning, and you are capable of growth. Why would you close the door to that?
--Mary Steenburgen

Planted

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.
--Audre Lorde

Break and Leave

We see the beauty of all that will break and leave us--a brief touch, a breath, a glance, a sip of water, the glowing leaves falling from the trees, the ones we love, and our own life.
--Sallie Tisdale

Shadow

She added up her life over and over, but the sums were never quite the same. Whose are? It's like measuring your shadow.
--Rebecca Solnit

Already

If you're asking when climate change is going to "happen," you're really asking when's it going to happen to "me," because it's already happened to many other people.
--Eric Roston

Back

Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it.
--Rebecca Solnit

It Exists

Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists.
--Sogyal Rinpoche [10.31.06]

Others

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.
--Mary Oliver

Perfection

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
--Rebecca Solnit

Contemplate

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
--Marshall McLuhan (1967)

Dismantle

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
--Audre Lorde

Move

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
--Rosa Luxemburg [11.30.11]

Despair

Despair, surely the least aggressive of sins, is dangerous to the totalitarian temperament because it is a state of intense inwardness, thus independence. The despairing soul is a rebel.
--Joyce Carol Oates [09.11.01]

Trying

A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
--B.F. Skinner

Reliant

But I understood its final philosophical stance perfectly. Fragility and preciousness are not paired out of some regrettable irony; they are reliant on each other. It's because we know our time with people will end that we can find ourselves flooded with gratitude for their presence.
--Linda Holmes