"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly
useless manner, you have learned how to live."
- Lin Yutang
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
-E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
Death affords those who are left an opportunity to reevaluate everything. And though we would give all we have to defer that opportunity, it exists anyway. It allows us to see the flimsiness of our expectations, to realize there is not expectation without disappointment; it allows us the possibility to being more sensitive, more vulnerable, to let others support us, and to notice the integrity and love often left unobserved in life's fast pace. Mainly, it gives us the chance to live life in the present.
-Joan Bordow
"We all came from the sea. All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean ... we are tied to the ocean, and when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came."
-John F. Kennedy
There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
"I feel that this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong."
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What's right for you -- just listen to
The voice that speaks inside.
- Shel Silverstein
"Whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slighty off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in a pond, and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can really be happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer."
-Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
