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Shedding the carapace we have been building so assiduously on the surface, we must by definition give up exactly what we thought was necessary to protect us from further harm.

David Whyte

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David Whyte
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: September 21
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Poet
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Marrickville
New South Wales
Australia
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Carapace
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The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties.
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To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
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Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
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There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
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What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.
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But what would that be like feeling the tide rise out of the numbness inside
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I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love.
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To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous to allow our selves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self...the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation.
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Genius is becoming something you were all along.
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There is no house like the house of belonging.
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Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
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To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
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The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.
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The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
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It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.
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Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's.
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We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again
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and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love
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We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.
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