"I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it."

“Reading is always a way of forming a bond with other people. I'm not very good at socializing - I quite like spending time alone - so reading is a way of engaging quite deeply with the way other people think. Quite often when you meet other people socially you don't get to have a conversation of any depth. You end up talking about how well or how badly someone is doing at school or something of that sort. Questions like, "What we are," "Who we are," "Where are we going," you get those from literature and from people that spend some time thinking.”

Source : Source: www.guernicamag.com

“I'm still trying to decide. It's a really difficult one because I really enjoy my time in the Air Force. And I'd love to continue it. But the pressures of my other life are building. And fighting them off or balancing the two of them has proven quite difficult.”

“He charged nothing for his preaching and it was worth it too.”

“Paying tax is not a punishment. It's a responsibility.”

“We don't really understand something until we have forgotten it.”

Source : Nancy Willard (2014). “A Nancy Willard Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.303, Open Road Media

“Especially look to those sins to which your crosses have some reference and respect. Are you crossed in your goods? Think if you did not over-love them and get them unjustly, or if in your children, see if you did not over-love them and cocker them, and so in all things of like kind. In what God smites vou, see if you have not in that sinned against Him, and so frame to lament your sins and to seek help against them.”

“Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.”

“There is always something missing that torments me.”

Source : Camille Claudel's letter to Auguste Rodin (1886), as quoted on a plaque at 19 Quai de Bourbon in Paris, where Claudel lived and worked from 1899 to 1913,