Irving Townsend quotes

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle; easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we would still live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.
-- Irving Townsend

#Memories #Circles #Understanding

Another cat? Perhaps. For love there is also a season; its seeds must be resown. But a family cat is not replaceable like a wornout coat or a set of tires. Each new kitten becomes its own cat, and none is repeated. I am four cats old, measuring out my life in friends that have succeeded but not replaced one another.
-- Irving Townsend

#Cat #Animal #Humanity

Could the purr be anything but contemplative?
-- Irving Townsend

#Contemplative

Unlike us, cats never outgrow their delight in cat capacities, nor do they settle finally for limitations. Cats, I think, live out their lives fulfilling their expectations.
-- Irving Townsend

#Cat #Thinking #Expectations

No one shall deny me my own conclusions, nor my cat her reflective purr.
-- Irving Townsend

#Cat #Deny #Conclusion

It was not I who was teaching my cat to gather rosebuds, but she who was teaching me.
-- Irving Townsend

#Teaching #Cat #Rosebuds

We have inherited a great music. This music is a holdover. It comes with us like the skin, the texture of our hair. It's our memory banks.

Blaire, This was my grandmother’s. My father’s mother. She came to visit me before she passed away. I have fond memories of her visits and when she passed on she left this ring to me. In her will I was told to give it to the woman who completes me. She said it was given to her by my grandfather who passed away when my dad was just a baby but that she’d never loved another the way she’d loved him. He was her heart. You are mine. This is your something old. I love you, Rush

Sixty years after the end of the war, the time has come to make this information available. With the number of survivors and witnesses diminishing by the day, and the reality that the Holocaust is fading into the pages of history and memory, we should not have to wait any longer.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.

Oh, blindness to the future! kindly giv'n, That each may fill the circle mark'd by heaven.

We are not separate. Our sense of separateness is superficial and exist only in the physical dimension. In our human element, we are not separate; we’re very much connected. Every other human being is just as precious as we are, and worthy of as much respect and love and consideration. This understanding needs to manifest in our conduct in each moment. This is the part of the Work that will transform you.

Cats and I have an understanding, but we choose not to interact often.

When time and space and change converge, we find place. We arrive in Place when we resolve things. Place is peace of mind and understanding. Place is knowledge of self. Place is resolution.

The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.