World breaks us all

Some become strong at broken places
All craft meaning from broken pieces

Hemingway (Prof P-mix)

Wound is where light enters you

Rumi

A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken.

Play of light is the first and last rule of mosaic.

With a quick blow, a tessera is born, the essential cube in the creation of a mosaic.

Surfaces are irregular, even angled, to increase the dance of light on tesserae.

Tesserae are rough, individualized, unique.

There is a perfection in imperfection—interstices or gaps between tesserae speak their own language.

Many colors are used to create one color from afar.

Ceilings, walls, arches, and cupola shimmer and shine like the morning sun striking the expectant wicks of a thousand gilded grasses in the prairie.

Terry Tempest Williams,
Finding Beauty In Broken World

And so it was I entered the broken world
Turning shadow into transient beauty—
Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth

TS Eliot, Waste Land

And you may find yourself
In a beautiful house
With a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
“Well, how did I get here?”

Talking Heads, Once In Lifetime

There is little doubt that in the far future all planets and all stars and all galaxies and all black holes and all other complex arrangements of matter will meet their end, either in a fiery conflagration (should the expansion of space reverse itself), a violent shredding (should the expansion of space speed up dramatically) or through a more gentle dissolution into a bath of particles wafting through the darkness (should the expansion of space continue its current pattern).

Mortality is thus an affliction not only of life but of Cosmos.

When I forced myself to take these facts in fully—not just conceptually but emotionally—it was, at first, overwhelming.

Yet as I allowed myself to sink into the cosmic dissolution, the larger death of everything cast a new light on everything in the here and now.

In assuaging the terror of this cosmic mortality awareness, I found myself drawn to an unbridled appreciation for the brief window in the cosmic unfolding when particles can form conglomerations that attain the remarkable capacity of self-awareness.

The capacity that allows us to love and hate and laugh and cherish and comfort and grieve and celebrate and consecrate and thrill and regret—and, critically, to know that we experience these things.

The fact that bags of particles governed by physical law can do all this fills me with a deep sense of gratitude.

Brian Greene, Foreword To Denial Of Death

When the impulse to cry strikes, we should be grown up enough to cede to it.

There is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a proper grown-up who does not frequently yearn to be comforted like a toddler.

Alain de Botton, Therapeutic Journey

Achilles routs Trojans, and, rushing into the city with them, is killed by Paris and Apollo.

A great struggle for his body then follows, Aias taking up his body and carrying it to the ships, while Odysseus drives off Trojans behind.

Achaeans then lay out the body of Achilles, while Thetis, arriving with Muses and her sisters, bewails her son, whom she afterwards transports to White Island.

Achaeans pile him a cairn and hold games in his honor.

A dispute ensues over his arms.

Fragments Of Aethiopis

Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. 

I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

And I said to myself, “Go!” I must to all who appear to know, and find out the meaning.

And I swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear!—for I must tell you the truth—the result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that some inferior men were really wiser and better.

And yet I know that this plainness of speech makes them hate me—and what is their hatred but proof that I am speaking the truth?

Defense Of So Crates

Say who you are. Really say it in your life and in your work.

Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years.

Your writing will be a record of your time—it can’t help but be. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world—because that person will recognize him or herself in you.

That will give them hope—it’s done so for me.

And I have to keep rediscovering it—it’s profound importance in my life.

Give that to the world rather than selling something to the world.

Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work, and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to.

Charlie Kaufman