I danced growing up. I had two friends of mine that, actually, one of them wound up dancing with Alvin Ailey.
I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
Think. . . of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.
The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.
Alas, woman is faithful as long as she loves, but you demand that she be faithful without love and give herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel then, woman or man?
And all of a sudden, all of my sins came before me. Everything I had ever done wrong that I had forgotten about years ago came into my mind. And I prayed, Lord, forgive me, may the blood of Jesus Christ cleanse me from all of my sins. . . not because of my good works or because of all the things I have tried to do, but because the Lord had forgiven me.
The question of religion was a matter for each individual's conscience, and in a great many cases was the outcome of birth or residence in a certain geographical area.
We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings.