“Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?”

~ Tony Hoagland

“I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.”

~ Stephen Dunn

“Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible? 

Can we go outside and listen?"

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

"Dive in with your eyes closed
For the life you were born to claim
And the water will be paralyzed
By the courage you contain
And the flutter of your earnest heart
It will fill the silent seas"

~ Ryan O'Neal 

"The trouble with the present is
that it's always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period – already gone."

~ Billy Collins

"As conscious human beings, we know we die, and we therefore know our clock ends on, some level. So time just seems foundational. And I think a lot of the gymnastics that we do as human beings has to do with our relationship to the clock, or lack of a relationship to the clock. We squander time until it’s too late, et cetera. I love looking at the building blocks, the raw material, the irreducibles."

~ B.J. Miller

the strangest things can conjure up the past,
and forgotten time will find its long way back. 

as thin as air, as light as snow
some combination of the unknown,
but it doesn’t matter, i just know i need more.

~ Sleeping at Last
 

"I'll never be the fastest teenager, and I'm okay with that. It doesn't matter if I'm better or worse than someone. It just matters that in a year from now, I'm stronger, I'm faster, and I'm a better person."

~ Cole Cooper

When I talk to people about finding stories in their life, I'm talking about finding things that are almost in their everyday that they can bring great meaning to and connect to audiences or to people around the lunch table.

~ Matthew Dicks

"How’s this poem for its ability to collapse all the years from childhood to middle age in a matter of fifteen short lines?"

"The true material of knowledge is meaning. And the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. And the only thing that we should have gleaned by skimming and skipping forward is really trivia."

~ Maria Popova

Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood here now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?
Shed a tear, kiss her forehead
for the simple reason
we share a birthdate?

~ Wisława Szymborska

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.

~ Epictetus

The simple act of honouring one’s need for time and space, between the competing parts of our day, is age old.

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

~ Mary Oliver

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

~ David Whyte

"This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space?"

~ Antony Gormley

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,
most intense when the wind blows through it
and the sound it makes equally strange,
like the sound of the wind in a movie—

Louise Glück