Emma Raveling

I'd spent my life searching for something I couldn't name.And as I drowned in the torrential flow of conflicting desires, caught in the relentless roar of water, earth, blood, and war, I reached out - wildly, desperately - and found it with him.

The flower drifted, light and open, gliding a path through still water like the faint stirrings of a dream.

He can't give you a future.""I know. Because I make my own future.

I could stand alone because I knew I was not alone.

I walked forward simply because there was no going back.

Love was as flawed and terrible and beautiful as we were. To be alive meant looking for it in ourselves and in others, an imperfection searching for an impossible perfection.Because in that journey was where truth resided.Love wasn__ about being held. It was about being freed.

To be ready does not mean it will be easy. It doesn't mean it will be smooth. It means that even when it's difficult, you have what it takes to survive.

Some deaths were long, the decay so gradual the rotted end was nothing more than a sigh disappearing in the wind.Others were quick, the abrupt cut of a life in mid-phrase leaving unanswered questions lingering like an unresolved harmony.

An artist's domain was private, a haven for practicing and experimenting, the one place where failure was still allowed.

Fast food, fast money, shallow thinking, shallow interpretations. This is now what I deal with everyday. Art was meant to be about freedom, about having the courage to explore what it means to be human.

In music, she'd found a perfect language, a way of expressing the inexpressible.

The choice is not in what you do. The choice is in the why.