--MAUVE, MAUVE, EVERYWHERE MAUVE...

“All of life, for me, begins with books and art.”

“When you love something like reading—or drawing or music or nature—it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great.  If you are lucky enough to know this, then your search for meaning involves whatever that Something is.”

“Maybe we can all agree that meaning is always going to have to do with love.”

“Beauty is meaning.”

“Some of us even pray.  Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom and justice.”

"In order to become who I was meant to be, I learned I had to waste more paper, to practice messes, false starts and blunders.”

“Maybe we don’t find a lot of answers to life’s tougher questions, but if we find a few true friends, that’s even better.  They help you see who you truly are, which is not always the loveliest possible version of yourself, but then comes the greatest miracle of all—they still love you.”

“When I die, the people to whom I am closest should grieve forever.  They should never quite get over me.  Otherwise I will seem dead to them, no matter how close I may secretly be.”

“Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.”

“Alone, we are doomed, but by the same token, we’ve learned that people are impossible, even the ones we love most—especially the ones we love most: they’re damaged, prickly and set in their ways.”

"When you watch the people you love under fire, you realize that the secret of life is patch, patch, patch.”

“Most of the time, love bats last.”

“Beauty is the miracle of things going together imperfectly.”

“The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here.  It is phenomenal just to be.”

“Our lives are made up of fleeting seconds.”

“We forget so much.”

“There can be meaning without having things making sense.”

“We live stitch by stich, when we’re lucky.  If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.”

Anne Lamott