Being different is a revolving door in your life where secure people enter and insecure exit.

— Shannon L. Alder

Blessed are those with cracks in their broken heart because that is how the light gets in.

— Shannon L. Alder

But now that so much is changing, isn't it time for us to change? Couldn't we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child's toy-box and please him and no longer him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like dilettantes, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which has always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

But, standing in the fading golden sunlight now, I can feel some of the scars of the summer stabbing over. I can feel the promise of a new beginning.

— Aimee Friedman

But the crowds are surging around them and her backpack is heavy on her shoulders and the boy's eyes are searching hers with something like loneliness, like the very last thing he wants is to be left behind right now. And that's something Hadley can understand, too, and so after a moment she nods in agreement, and he tips the suitcase forward onto it's wheels, and they begin to walk.

— Jennifer E. Smith

But what is great can only begin great.

— Martin Heidegger

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black Levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street.

— Thomas Pynchon

COME HOME, TENOR! COME HOME!” In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.

— Shannon L. Alder

Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.

— Robin Hobb