Q23

Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.

John Ortberg

Q22

Augustus Waters, "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green

Q21

I have so much to say to you. 
I want to begin at the beginning 
because this is what you deserve. 
I want to tell you everything, 
without leaving any single detail. 
But where is the beginning?

And what is everything?

                                                               J.S. Foer

Q20

As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed. 

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn | Betty Smith

Q19: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

But in every way, she's learned from every thing. That's why she chooses to be happy and brave-- enough to back you up, be right by you, and tell you, "Everything will be alright. I was once there, too."

OF TRYING OUT NEW THINGS

My first Moleskine Art (click photo to make it 'look' clearer, not really hi-res)

Quotes from How the Water Feels to the Fishes by Dave Eggers

Original snaps taken during my first Manila Ocean Park visit

Q18

Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits. 

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments | Roland Barthes

Q017

The best place in the world is in the center of God's will. Find yourself there and MAKE ME PROUD.

                                                           J.Cruz

JUST BEFORE THIS LONG, ODD SUMMER ENDS

I stumbled upon Jenny Han's Summer series once upon a sappy night.
And with utter desperation, I tried to settle with quotes from the book, for the mean time, so I hope.

In the wishlist:

The Summer I Turned Pretty

• "For me, it was almost Winter didn't count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in Summers."
• "Victory is a thousand times sweeter when you're the underdog."
• "Would you rather live one perfect day over and over or live your life with no perfect days but just decent ones?"

It's Not Summer Without You

• "I will never look at you the same way ever again. I'll never be that girl again. The girl who comes running back everytime you push her away, the girl who loves you anyway."
• "I release you. I evict you from my heart. Because if I don't do it now, I never will."
• "How do you regret on of the best nights of your entire life? You don't. You remember every word, every look. Even when it hurts, you still remember."

We'll Always Have Summer

• "Firsts were important."
• "But just because you bury something, that doesn't mean it stops existing. Those feelings, they've been there all along. All the time. I had to face it. He was part of my DNA."
• "I knew I had to be careful. I had to keep my distance. If she knew how much I still cared, it was all over. I wouldn't be able to walk away again. The first time was hard enough."
• "I'd stayed away for two years. I had to. I knew I shouldn't even be at the Summer house,... it was dangerous."

I know these books carry a pocketful of risks, just because. Let me have them, anyway. 

Q016

My daddy always said that if the good Lord can take the time to care for something as small as a baby sparrow nesting in a tree, then surely He could take the time to listen to a little girl in Ringgold, Georgia. So every night before I went to bed I got down my knees and begged the Lord to find me a way out of this town. And every morning, I woke up in the same old place. 

                                              Looking For Salvation at The Dairy Queen | Susan Gilmore

I think it's clear why I'm still here. This place is not done with me yet. 

Q015

On the other hand, she was a woman with a million happy memories, who knew what it was like to experience true love and who was ready to experience more life, more love and make new memories. Whether it happened in ten months or ten years, Holly would obey Gerry's final message. Whatever lay ahead, she knew she would open her heart and follow where it led. 

In the meantime, she would just live.

                                                                                                           Cecelia Ahern

TO MY BOOKS: Read and Unread

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. -Cecelia Ahern

Q014

I sort through the letters and pull out what I need for the beginning. They snap easily into place. And even though I thought I would need every letter, I finish the first sentence and realize that it’s all I have left to say, 

"I MISS YOU."

                                                                                                                Hold Still | Nina LaCour 

LOVE-WHERE DOES IT GO AFTER A BREAK-UP?

by Andrea Lucado

A certain character on a certain rerun of a certain TV show asked a puzzling question: “When you love someone, and you break up, where does the love go?” Thank you Carrie Bradshaw for the inspiration for this week’s post.

At first, this question is a little absurd. Love can’t go anywhere, Carrie. It’s a feeling. Feelings don’t have feet. But think about a relationship you’ve been in. You invested in it: time, emotion, energy. You developed a set of feelings for a new person that you never had before. And those are unique feelings, just for them. Now think about when the relationship ended (happy Monday morning, everybody). That unique set of feelings created for just that one person don’t disappear suddenly. They are left over with no place to direct themselves, nowhere to go. Love is left in an awkward position. Hovering around the person after the break-up, wanting to be used but having no one to use them on.

Thought of in that way, love’s ability to go or not go places makes perfect sense. And the direct answer to Miss Bradshaw’s question is that love doesn’t actually go anywhere at all. Instead, it sticks around and waits for us to do something with it. The question then is “What do I do with it?”

Many options here. It’s difficult to have a unique set of feelings being unused, so maybe you decide to use them on someone else that isn’t quite deserving but is convenient in proximity. Or you may channel the hovering love feelings into something else like obsessing over work, or traveling as much as possible–things that make you think you’re using the love that once was but when you’re lying in bed at night, you see it still faintly hovering.

So where’s the best place to leave love or take love when you can no longer send it to a significant other? Keeping it close and acknowledging its presence can be burdensome. But ignoring it only lasts until the pain comes back again later.

My best answer is that you let it stick around until it becomes just plain love again. Not love for that one person that’s no longer around. But its original form: the love humans are made of and live for. Easier said than done.

Q013

If you're gonna be a bear, be a grizzly.

                                            When In Rome

Q012

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.

                                                                                                                                                                                              Neil Gaiman

Q011

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

                                                                                                                                       Neil Gaiman

Q010

Lay me down on a bed of roses;

Sink me in a river at dawn;

Send me away with the words of a love song.

                                                                                                                   The Band Perry

STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK: MY NAME IS MEMORY By Ann Brashares

Ann*As promised*

• I have seen beauty in countless things. 
• She honored herself with the idea that maybe he needed her, that maybe she was the one who could understand him. 
• "If he liked you, you would know it."
• How many times could you give up on someone you loved?
• "This might be the last time I see him, " she said plaintively. "I don't know what will happen after this. I need to make him remember me." 
• "I thought the year would end and we would all go our separate ways and we could never have talked to each other," she said bravely.
• "I'm so sorry. I love you. Do you know that?" He was holding her, pressing his face desperately in her hair. "I always have."
• He'd push her. He'd scared her. He besieged her. He'd vowed he wouldn't and he did.
• She is my doing and my undoing. She always had been.
• He tricked himself into thinking that she would look into his eyes and remember, that love would conquer all.
• "You were supposed to remember... him." Esme said it loudly and with indignation. "You were supposed to remember how you loved him. He said he would come back, and you promised you would remember him."
• "I thought maybe you finally gave up on Daniel and decided to move on, but now I'm suddenly thinking that's not the whole story."
•  That was the first time I knew her and loved her. I loved her innocently then, I promised you. Even in my mind.
• How much silence was lonely? How much attention was unsettling? How little attention was cold?
• There are short periods of joy you have to stretch through of empty years... You have to make them last as well as you can.
• "You're a good man and I do not understand you."
• When you live as long as I do, always is a crippling distance.
• Smell was like the wormhole connecting you to the other parts. Memories of smell didn't fade, and they short-circuited your entire psychology. It is the closest thing to time travel on this earth.
• As I've said it's desire more than anything else that keeps us coming back for more. 
• "I loved him. He didn't want to leave me. He said we'd be together again. He said he wouldn't ever forget me, no matter what, and I have to try not to forget him. That's why I wrote the note."
• "This didn't happen by accident. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It's you who makes me a person."
• "I'm sorry for what you've been through," she said. "I can't stand to think of the pain you've been in. You deserve better."
• "I'm a stubborn chit, you know." I held her hard. "Yes, you are. But you are not hopeless."
• "You'll fall in love again. And maybe you'll look back and remember me every so often. And when you come back again, I will be waiting for you. I will find you."
• Please believe him. Keep your heart open to him. He can make you happy. He has always loved you, and you once loved him with all your heart.
• "You are a hoarder," Ben said to me once. "You hate to let go."
• "Attachment disorder" it said in big, sharp print at the top.
• It was the thought of her that kept me moving forward.
• "Love who you love while you have them. That's all you can do. Let them go when you must.if you know how to love, you'll never run out."
• "You love your memory but you need to love your girl," she said by way of parting. "You remember what is lost, and you forget what's right in front of you." 
• "Next time?" "Next time,"she said. It was a ritual between them. It was always next time. She wanted something to hold on to so she could believe in next time.
• Some chances you really did lose.
• "I still love you, and I think about you all the time. I'm not down there. I'm right here."
• He loved it because he'd been loved.
• It was not a smile but like a smile.It wasn't a face of fear.It was an expression of faith more than anything. She had faith in him and the things he promised her. She trusted him.
• No! If you don't have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let the world happen to you. 
• "I know I said I'd let you, but I can't."
• He had to fight. That's all he had. Not memories, nor experiences, not skills. He had a will. And his will was to fight until he couldn't fight anymore.
• Don't you go yet, he begged his heart.

"I need to tell you something."

"Okay."

"I'm glad you told me."

"Yes, because now I can tell you that it's okay."

"What Daniel taketh away, Daniel giveth."

"What do you mean?"

"You gave more than you took, my love. We're all square."

• I get defeated or discouraged, and I die because I've figured there's always a new life and it will be better. But nothing can be better than this life, because I have you.
• You promised me, she said to him in her thoughts every morning and night and a thousand times in between. I love you. I won't give up on you.
• Love demands everything, they say, but my love for you demands only this: that no matter what happens or how long it takes, you'll keep faith in  me, you'll remember who we are, and you'll never feel despair. Yours forever,...

Q009

The heart has its reasons

which reason knows nothing of.

                                        Blaise Pascal