We can’t change the cards we’re dealt,
just how we play the hand.

- Randy Pausch

We make a living by what we get,
but we make a life by what we give.

by Winston Churchill

ladder's gone

Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

by W.B. Yeats

a birthday poem

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things,
When people who go about singing or kissing
Know deeper things than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
And people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.

Novalis (c. 1800)