Girls Who Read Books

“Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.”

—Charles Warnke

To Live With Open Heart; To Grow Up Through The Common

“To live content with small means;

to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;

to be worthy, not respectable,

and wealthy, not rich;

to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly;

to listen to stars and birds,

to babes and sages, with open heart;

to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely,

wait occasions, hurry never.

In a word,

to let the spiritual, unbidden, and unconscious,

grow up through the common.“

- William Henry Channing 

 

Never a Slave of the Ordinary

“Be Daring, Be Different,

Be Impractical, Be Anything that will

Assert Integrity of Purpose

and Imaginative Vision Against

the Play-It-Safers, The Creatures of

The Commonplace,

The Slaves of the Ordinary.“

-Cecil Beaton

A Life Lesson From The Sun

Even after all this time the Sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me.”

Look What happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.

-Hafiz, a Persian poet of the 1300