For it is only framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful. A tree has significance if one sees it against the empty face of sky. A note in music gains significance from the silences on either side. A candle flowers in the space of night. Even small and casual things take on significance if they are washed in space, like a few autumn grasses in one corner of an Oriental painting, the rest of the page bare.
Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.
We seem so frightened today of being alone that we never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there is still the radio or televsion to fill up the void... We can do our housework with soap-opera heroes at our side... Now instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we do not even listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. We must re-learn to be alone.
The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.
You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.
Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.
People "died" all the time. . . . Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead.
Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?
The nice thing about really intelligent people is that when you talk with them they make you feel intelligent too.
When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation.
Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.
My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.
The ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.
It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feelings one can go through in one day.
Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience.
And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life.
there is no aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler.
It is a difficult lesson to learn today-to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour or a day or a week. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.
I must try to be alone for part of each year...and part of each day...in order to keep my core, my center...Women must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities. She must be the pioneer of achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.
The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.
One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much.
To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.
Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.
For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
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