God’s Year By Piotr Stachiewicz (Polish, 1858–1938)

I want the cottage. I want the green grass and the tomato plants. I want the peace in you; the front porch rocking chair lullaby; our cricket legs rubbing together under the covers. We can’t have it all. I know that, but humor me. We can’t have it all, but we can have most of it.

Caitlyn Siehl, from “Apple Pie Life” (via oofpoetry)

Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi, May 16, 1939

Summer Front Porch by Janet Kruskamp

“I lived in a house in Moscow once, where the beams and floorboards were made from an old ship’s timbers. When there was a storm at sea, the timbers used to creak and groan, even though the air around the house was quite still. The house was very old, and those timbers hadn’t been near the sea for a hundred years or more, but still they remembered. In their dreams they heard it sing.”

— Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Anna  (via countcracula)

“The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things  (via antigonies)

The Indianapolis News, Indiana, March 28, 1934

Again I quoted a poet - to avoid sounding like a preacher myself - who had written, ‘What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.’ Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

All I do is act incorrectly in response to stimuli

that's it that's the whole show