--ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS LISTEN

…I’m back from a fun weekend in Portland.  I saw old friends and laughed and played a lot.

Today my body is letting me know just how much fun I had, and I’m trying to regroup for reentry.

…Here are some things to ponder on a Monday:

"When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear.  For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists." Paul Auster

"No one’s going to do something for you, and I think that’s been the thing that’s gotten me through everything. I’ve never sat around and waited for anybody to do anything for me. If I wanted to do something, I made it happen." Alyssa Mastromonaco, Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Operations

"No home is complete without affection. You can have all the Picassos in the world or walls made of gold, but without affection it's nothing." Claudio Luti

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life." J. K.  Rowling

+"If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.” Terry Pratchett

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will." Epictetus

"I wanted some music to let me know just how short it all is. Something to let me know how impossible my words are. But it's a trick I won't master. Something to say, but no way to get at it. I can write what it's about — I can't write the thing itself." Sam Rasnake

+“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.” Ray Bradbury

"The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success." Vauvenargues

"A man is only as good as what he loves." Saul Bellow

"Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are." Malcolm Forbes

+"America is the land of second chances.  All you have to do is ask." Frank Farley

"The past isn't dead.  It isn't even past." Faulkner