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"For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains."Longing, says the poet Robert Hass, "because desire is full of endless distances. Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world."
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"This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. It is the same as that on the preceding page, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory. It is here that the little prince appeared on Earth, and disappeared.Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognise it in case you travel some day to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back."

"Can we account for instinct?' said Monte Cristo. 'Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? - why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections - an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places - which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place."

"Sometimes people think the old days were better than today. Even though life was simpler and slower, it was not necessarily easier."

"I had a dream about you last night. We were in your old Civic. Nine Inch Nails was turned up on the stereo and I was taking pictures of you behind the wheel with my disposable camera. We went through the drive through at El Pollo Loco, placed an order for a hundred bucks worth of food, and then just drove off at the window. I miss being stupid with you."

"I think of you when upon the sea the sun flings her beams. I think of you when the moonlight shines in silvery streams. I see you when upon the distant hills the dust awakes; At night when on a fragile bridge the traveler quakes.I hear you when the blows rise on high, with murmur deep. To tread the silent grove where wander I, When all's asleep."

"I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago."
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"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go."


"Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act. As they did in Egypt, where liberty leading the masses was an earnest young woman in a black hijab."


"Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on."


"Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth-and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere."


"In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering, while learning not to inflict it on others, is part of the work we're all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things."


"Beauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears."


"You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us."


"To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery."


"For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom."
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