You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body 
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

Michelsons

A faded 1950’s style drug store was probably my favorite shop as a boy. It was situated at the corner of Walnut and Shirley Ave—diagonally across from my father’s butcher store. Upon entering, your attention was pulled in a half a dozen directions. At the far end was a long Formica counter lined with a dozen vinyl covered chrome rotating-stools at its feet. To be a boy, swiveling to your heart’s content while sipping a cool lime Rickie on a hot summer day was sugar heaven.

Speaking of sugar, there was plenty of five & ten cent candy bars that were scattered throughout the store. I remember buying lots of Beatle’s cards that were packed five at a time with a strip of pink chewing gum inside.

Another treat was to peruse the 12 cent comic books that were displayed vertically in thin metal floor displays. Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and other super-heroes filled our collective boyhood imagination—and were more fun than any schoolbook. 

Along another wall near the old-fashioned wood phone booth were magazines and pulp-fiction books with ripped off covers. I was too young to fully understand what murkiness lay buried in those pages; cheap fiction, pulp fiction, and adult novels whose themes were out of reach for a 13-year-old boy. A 13-year-old boy that would soon be late for Hebrew school.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

Alan Bennett, The History Boys

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.

Cornelia Funke, Inkspell (Inkworld, #2)

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1)