...have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.

Try to love the questions themselves,

like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.

Do not now look for the answers.

They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.

It is a question of experiencing everything.

At present you need to live the question.

Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it,

find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet --

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent.

When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines:

a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog,

a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento

because the painter "repented," changed his mind.

Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception,

replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

That is all I mean about the people in this book.

The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once,

what is there for me now.

-- Lillian Hellman, Pentimento --

Things never were "the way they used to be."

Things never will be "the way it's going to be someday."

Things are always just the way they are for the time being.

And the time being is always in motion.

-- Robert Fulghum --

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed;

the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing,

the sea does not cease to grind down rock.

Generations do not cease to be born,

and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us.

The moment we cease to hold each other,

the moment we break faith with one another,

the sea engulfs us

and the light goes out.

-- James Baldwin, Nothing Personal --

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