To be nobody but yourself....

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. 

~e.e. cummings, 1955

..that person was you...!!

“Looking back you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life and that person was you. It is not too late to become that person again.”

― Robert Brault 

In your beauty...

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that light becomes this art. 

~Rumi, as interpreted by Coleman Barks

Autumnal face....

No spring nor summer’s beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face....

~John Donne, "Elegy IX: The Autumnal"

Nothing else but light...

Louder and louder the deep thunder rolled, as through the myriad halls of some vast temple in the sky; fiercer and brighter came the lightning; more and more heavily the rain poured down. The eye, partaking of the quickness of the flashing light, saw in its every gleam a multitude of objects which it could not see at steady noon in fifty times that period.... in a trembling, vivid, flickering instant, everything was clear and plain: then came a flash of red into the yellow light; a change to blue; a brightness so intense that there was nothing else but light; and then the deepest and profoundest darkness. 

~Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter XLII

There is something haunting...

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. 

~Joseph Conrad

If there's one thing...

If there's one thing that I pray for,
      As I live my daily life,
      It's that I may be courageous
      When I'm faced with bitter strife!...

So, I humbly pray for courage
      To be with me morn and night,
      Thro' the coldness of the Winter
      And the Summer's bright sunlight!

~Gertrude T. Buckingham, "Courage"