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For JennAt 12 years old I started bleeding with the moonand beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts. I fought with my knuckles white as stars, and left bruises the shape of Salem.There are things we know by heart, and things we don't. At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke. I'd watch the nicotine rising from her lips like halos, but I could never make dying beautiful. The sky didn't fill with colors the night I convinced myselfveins are kite strings you can only cut free. I suppose I love this life, in spite of my clenched fist. I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree, and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers, and I wonder if Beethoven held his breaththe first time his fingers touched the keysthe same way a soldier holds his breaththe first time his finger clicks the trigger. We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe. But my lungs rememberthe day my mother took my hand and placed it on her bellyand told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister's heartbeat. And I knew life would tremblelike the first tear on a prison guard's hardened cheek, like a prayer on a dying man's lips, like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky like an empty gun in a war zone…just take me just take me Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much, the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood. We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways, but you still have to call it a birthday. You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recessand hope she knows you can hit a baseballfurther than any boy in the whole third gradeand I've been running for homethrough the windpipe of a man who singswhile his hands playing washboard with a spoonon a street corner in New Orleanswhere every boarded up window is still painted with the words We're Coming Backlike a promise to the oceanthat we will always keep moving towards the music, the way Basquait slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain. Beauty, catch me on your tongue. Thunder, clap us open. The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks. Tonight lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert, then wake us washing the feet of pregnant womenwho climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun. I know a thousand things louder than a soldier's gun. I know the heartbeat of his mother. Don't cover your ears, Love.Don't cover your ears, Life.There is a boy writing poems in Central Parkand as he writes he movesand his bones become the bars of Mandela's jail cell stretching apart, and there are men playing chess in the December coldwho can't tell if the breath rising from the boardis their opponents or their own, and there's a woman on the stairwell of the subwayswearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn, and I'm remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrunwith strip malls and traffic and vendorsand one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it. Ya'll, I know this world is far from perfect. I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon. I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.But every ocean has a shorelineand every shoreline has a tidethat is constantly returningto wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones, to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that brave riverthat has to run through the center of our heartsto find its way home. .Andrea Gibson
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Sometimes you have to create your own sunshine.Sam Sundquist
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Men are mere mortals but their quest for knowledge leads them to the brink of immortality.” Excerpt from novel You Can't Escape Love by Grace WillowsGrace Willows
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You can run from the truth. You can run and hide from the truth. You can deny and avoid the truth. But you cannot destroy the truth. Nor can you make the lie true. You must know that love will always uncover the truth.Delano Johnson
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Every Daydream-hope starts with little incentives !Nikhil Karke
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A good woman comes in all shapes and colors. When you find her, adore her.Delano Johnson
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Your love is like star sky showers and magenta unicorns.Delano Johnson
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Do you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer, and this is their heaven.L.m. Montgomery
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Don’t give up on your daydream! That little voice inside is telling you how to live your life with intent & purpose.Dawn Gluskin
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Fantasies... who needs fantasies? I have memories.B.J. Neblett
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Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.ClaireLouise Bennett
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Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.Gaston Bachelard
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What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.David Foster Wallace
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I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.Bram Stoker
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Visualization: daydreaming with a purpose.Pen
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A daydream is an evasion.Thomas Merton