oldwinesoul

[oldwinesoul]

“Come love, make me better than I was. Come teach me a kinder way to say my own name.”

// Andrea Gibson, from "Good Light," Lord of the Butterflies

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

“And in the end, I believe that we don't need to do anything to be loved. We spend our lives trying to seem prettier, smarter. But I realized two things.

Those who love us see us with their hearts and attribute qualities to us beyond those we really have.

And those who don't want to love us will never be satisfied with all our efforts.

Yes, I really believe that it is important to leave our imperfections alone. They are precious to understand those who see us with the heart.”

// Frida Kahlo

[oldwinesoul]

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

// Alan Watts

[oldwinesoul]

I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist. In thousands of agonies — I exist. I'm tormented on the rack - but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar - I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there.

And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.

// Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier - and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

// Susan Sontag

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]

[oldwinesoul]