Quotes by Carew Papritz

Sometimes we make being happy so difficult.And being thankful such a chore. Starting the day like a job we hate. Beginning it like swallowing ten tablespoons of devil made cough syrup.Because, somehow, along the way, we forget that being alive and healthy and happy are noble goals – or just good ideas.And that the opposite of being alive is being dead. What a choice.

Respect both what you need to know and what you dont need to know. Respect mystery, for mystery is still needed to run the universe.

I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink… how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep . . .

It’s a fool who thinks having a kid is a right, which is the biggest crock of fish heads I’ve ever heard.

Love your kids and just be there for them. You don’t have to eyeball their every moment or to orchestrate all their comings and goings. They know this. They know that’s too much.

Its a fool who thinks that having a kid is a right, which is the biggest crock of fishheads I’ve ever heard. You have a responsibility, not only to a person but also to a spirit because that’s what a child is. A pissing, crying, yawning, giggling, laughing package of spirit that is looking for you to take the lead. It’s a heck of a responsibility to look after a spirit.

Its through traveling you make the great journey into yourself, and its the clarity of extremes in traveling that forces you to meet yourself like youve never met yourself before.

Sometimes the best way is to get out of your own way.

Eat Ice Cream. Read Books. Be Happy.

Just because youre breathing, doesnt mean youre alive.

Be generous with your life - love deeply, honestly, and without reservation.

Remember, it’s still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you’d have nothing to look forward to. Besides, to be wise and eighteen is as possible as catching lightning in a bottle…

As an adult, be child-like as you learn but not child-ish as you live.

You become a man when, in having children, you not only physically look after and protect them but also protect them with all the love and learning you have to give.

Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity—civilization’s backbone—that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore. Yet they are also human-sized. And made of paper and ink, and thus they come from the earth. Their physicality is what makes them immensely human. And they contain the flesh-and-bone thoughts of one person capturing one blink of time, now made immortal in the bound pages carried by your own hands and touched by your own eyes. How can such fragile and thin paper and spidery veins of ink be our most precious treasure, binding together the entire hope and legacy and language of a civilization—of our existence. We touch the book and turn the page, and thus we are bound to our destiny.

My God, what a sensation to be an atom in the scheme of such grandiosity. The allurement, the jazz, and the physics of it all . . .

MUSIC. Tunneling right down into your CORE and SOULTIME. Hep, sloppy, SEXY and cerebral. Chancy and hip-swinging like ELVIS and your first teenage KISS.

There are hard days to live. And sometimes they will be just a few, and sometimes they will seem endless. And eventually youll come to understand that weve all been there before - or more than likely are going there now. And maybe that idea will make it easier for you, and maybe it wont. But there will still be hard days to live, and you will still have to find your way through them.

It is you who must someday break through the protective polish of who you are, to become naked and powerful to who you can truly be.

Remember, its still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, youd have nothing to look forward to.