I also assume that they are not simply the physical properties of things as now conceived by physical science. Instead, they are ecological, in the sense that they are properties of the environment relative to an animal.

If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.

Novalis

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Emily Dickinson

There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.

Henry Wheeler Shaw

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?

Jodi Picoult

First and foremost, I'm a feminist. And basically that stems from a strong belief that all people and creatures deserve equal opportunity, rights and respect.

Kathy Najimy

All books are either dreams or swords.

Amy Lowell

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It's just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.

Diane Arbus

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.

Thomas Carlyle

I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.

Agatha Christie

If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.

Ernest Hemingway

Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for it their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watched from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We are hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.

Jodi Picoult

I am hope.

Neil Gaiman