“And I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing. It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting. It’s hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having moronically forgotten to take it out of the washing machine. It’s the texts: ‘Hope today goes well’, 'How did today go?’, 'Thinking of you today’ and 'Picked up loo roll.’ I know that love happens under the splendour of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying in blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport or a traffic jam. Love is a quiet, reassuring thing: something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.”
– Everything I Know About Love, Book by “Dolly Alderton”
“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place because you’ll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves— slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Some chapters of life don’t actually have an apparent ending. They just fade away silently.
It’s a strange feeling to look back at the past sometimes and see how some parts of life have simply dissolved into nothingness. And even though this poem might sound sad, I believe that being mindful of the transience of life actually helps us to feel all the preciousness and beauty of it.
I wonder if later
I will forgive myself
for having denied my loved ones
demonstrations of my loving them.
I was too busy demonstrating
myself to the universe.
I was too busy turning
strangers into sites of worship.— Mikko Harvey, from “Funny Business,” Let the World Have You