There is something beautiful about a blank canvas, the nothingness of the beginning that is so simple and breathtakingly pure. It’s the paint that changes its meaning and the hand that creates the story. Every piece begins the same, but in the end they are all uniquely different.
It’s creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.
What it’s going to be, I don’t know.
Even after all that rushing around, where we’ve ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
And maybe knowing isn’t the point.
Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
―Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can’t help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.
―T.H. White, “The Troll” from Ghostly, Grim and Gruesome
When anything is possible, how do you choose?
―Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever
They’re ghosts, surely, and Rabbit absolutely believes in them. There are things in the world, strange machinations of physics and chemistry, queer intersections of biology and theology, that Rabbit hasn’t the slightest interest in assuming he’ll ever understand or be able to solve. They’re simply there to be believed in, and Rabbit is a born believer. He wants to believe. He has always thought of life as pregnant with possibility– a freak twister or wardrobe the only thing separating him from another world– so ghosts, spirits, aliens and supreme beings coexist within Rabbit with ease. There’s a kind of beauty in accepting the possibility, if not the plausibility, of everything imaginable.
―Kate Racculia, Bellweather Rhapsody
“Could anything top the promise and potential of a blank page? What could be more satisfying? Never mind that it would soon be crammed with awkward penmanship, that my handwriting inevitably sloped downhill to the right-hand corner, that I blotted my ink, that my drawings never came out the way I saw them in my head. Never mind all that. What counted was possibility. You could live on possibility, at least for a while.
―Jacqueline Kelly, The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate
You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.