That's the Way It Is

“The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.”

~ Anatole France (1844-1924), born François-Anatole Thibault, he was a French poet, journalist, and novelist.

Exploration

“One of the key things about Blyton, as about any great writer, is to provide you with what in its broadest sense could be termed a secular worldview – that is, a sense of the coexistence of diversity, and of the many forms of life and livelihood and living, and of cultures and ways of thinking and being that are very distant from your own, and overarching them all the feeling that many of these things are exciting and worth exploring and worth absorbing as some part of your own identity.”

-Rukun Advani, writer

No Day At the Beach

"I love women, they love me, fat and all, and my sister always said I would be one. I even gave it the good old college try. Not once, but twice. It would have been so easy if I could have been a lesbian. But no, I had to settle for heterosexuality, which, as some of you know, is no day at the beach." Camryn Manheim

Stay Hungry

Ben Okri's "Mental Fight"

Is humanity exhausted?
Individuals are, nations are,
Some civilisations are becoming so;
But humanity isn't.

The hungry nations are hungry still.
The starving people dream of food.
The unfree fight for freedom.
The oppressed plan for liberation.
The small scheme for might.
The invisible prepare for higher visibility.

They are only exhausted
Who think they are.
They are only exhausted who no longer
Have a reason to strive
And dream and hope.

They are only exhausted who think
That they have arrived
At their final destination,
The end of their road,
With all of their dreams achieved,
And with no new dreams to hold.

The exhausted are those who have
Come to the end of their powers
Of imagination, who have limited
Their possibilities, who have thought
Themselves into dead ends
That they call the highest
Points of civilisations.

Those who are exhausted have lost
The greater picture,
The greater perspective.

Interconnectedness

"I cannot be me without you
and we cannot be us without them,
and together we have a future."

Philip Carter, Anglican priest, director of the Julian Centre in Adelaide, Australia.

"Common humanity and universal responsibility link us. But much of the time we act as if this is not the case -- we are in denial as individuals and societies."

Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination, 2006.