--WE ALL FIND WAYS TO SOFTEN THE EDGES

 

…Oh, Friday, don’t you look so happy?

 

 “A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.” William Arthur Ward

“If the mind is like a hall in which thought

is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that
of someone else.”
--Wallace Stevens

“We only have two jobs on this earth.  The first is to learn and the second is to cope.” Shameless

"I don't like work... but I like what is in work -- the chance to find yourself. Your own reality -- for yourself, not for others -- which no other man can ever know." Joseph Conrad

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face." Eleanor Roosevelt

“I don’t think many people appreciate silence or realize that it is as close to music as you can get.” Toni Morrison

“No, no.  Stories are a different kind of truth.” Emma Donoghue

 “Forget safety.  Live where you fear to live.  Destroy your reputation.  Be notorious.” Rumi

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Zora Neal Hurston

"Someday, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process." Phillips Brooks

"The way I deal with arthritis is to keep moving. As long as I can play hard tennis, as long as I can ski or ride a horse - all kinds of things can come your way. As long as you can, do it. People who retire die. My dad retired and died shortly after. Just keep moving." 76 Year Old Actor Robert Redford

"I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade - Commenting on his 8 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, during which he was tortured over 20 times." James Stockdale

"There's a reason I swam five straight years and didn't take a single day off. There are reasons why I swam every holiday, every Christmas, every birthday. I was trying to be as prepared as I could, and I tried to see what I could really do and what my potential was. I just really did kind of whatever it took." Michael Phelps

"Aspire, break bounds. Endeavor to be good, and better still, best." Robert Browning

"Who would have ever heard of Theodore Roosevelt outside of his immediate community if he had only half committed himself to what he had undertaken, if he had brought only a part of himself to his task? The great secret of his career has been that he has flung his whole life, not a part of it, with all the determination and energy and power he could muster, into everything he has undertaken. No dillydallying, no faint-hearted efforts, no lukewarm purpose for him." Orison Sweet Marden

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" Robert Browning