'The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what's coming; never. That's the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it's hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you'll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you'd have missed it if you'd given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.'
'So you tell yourself
'To know someone is to sense that person's flavor - what you feel from that person. Each one has his or her own flavor, a particular personality from which many feelings appear. To fully appreciate this personality or flavor is to have a good relationship; to fully appreciate them.'
'Each of us is the curator of his or her life. In our galleries of meaning, certain displays may be chaotic at times, but meaning emerges by the very act of trying to arrange our treasures, even by accepting what cannot be rearranged. More important than the final result is our willingness to work at our lives in the same way a curator might work on his or her collection, keeping the storage rooms in order, rehanging this gallery or that. As curators we are also artists. We can paint new canvases and restore old ones, as well as mounting and displaying them. Setting priorities and holding to them is more important even than the materiel given us to shape or the talent we are born with. There are limits to life itself, but no expiration date on making of finding meaning within it. For the things that matter most - the parent project, the child project, the partner, friend, and God projects - the only limit lies in our willingness to take such projects seriously. When instead we neglect them, reacting helter-skelter to every little demand life imposes, we squander the most important gift we are given both as artists and as curators of meaning, the gift of time.'
'What of those two famous antonyms, dream and reality? Can I really say that dreams are necessary to live a complete life? Can I say that dreams are real and that reality as we know it has its root in dreams?...
