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"To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world--and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." (Marshall Berman/All That is Solid Melts Into Air )

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"…I was going home – to that home distant enough for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone, by which the humblest of us has the right to sit. We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends – those whom we obey, and those whom we love, but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties, -- even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice, -- even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees – a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear consciousness. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. I think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit – it is those who understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.” (Lord Jim/Joseph Conrad)

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“…and I lift my glass to the awful truth
which you can’t reveal to the ears of youth..." (Closing Time/Leonard Cohen)

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"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in...." (Anthem/Leonard Cohen)

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by way of jgf527 (RIP 7/2/2009) ""Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working.
They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.
Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven." Chuang Tse (by way of Ursula Le Guin)"


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"the pain passes but the beauty remains" (pierre-auguste renoir)

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"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more -- the feeling that i could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort -- to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires -- and expires, too soon, too soon -- before life itself." (Youth/Joseph Conrad)