Wisdom Wednesday: Family

Happy Wednesday! With Wednesday comes the inevitable "hump day" blues, sense of disillusionment, exhaustion, and longing for the weekend. Like a good shot of espresso, an inspiring quote can often inspire and perk me up, ready to take on what the rest of the day and week holds. Each Wednesday here on notsosimplestyle features a few bits of wisdom on varying topics, in the hopes you may find humor, inspiration, solace and affirmation.

With Thanksgiving rapidly approaching, it's that time of year when family and friends come together. We can be thankful for our family by blood, by marriage, by time, by love. No matter how we found them, what we call them, where they are; they are family. 


The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.
                       ~ Charles Kuralt


In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
                       ~ Alex Haley


I was born into the most remarkable and eccentric family I could possibly have hoped for.
                       ~ Maureen O'Hara


One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.
                       ~ Ralph Fiennes


My friends and family are my support system. They tell me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear and they are there for me in the good and bad times. Without them I have no idea where I would be and I know that their love for me is what's keeping my head above the water.
                        ~ Kelly Clarkson


Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with.
                        ~ Oliver Hudson


So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty. All other pacts of love or fear derive from it and are modeled upon it.
                         ~ Haniel Long


My family is my life, and everything else comes second as far as what's important to me.
                         ~ Michael Imperioli


When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves.
                         ~ Anne Lamott


I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other - and we still are.
                         ~ Richard Branson

Wisdom Wednesday: Love

Happy Wednesday! With Wednesday comes the inevitable "hump day" blues, sense of disillusionment, exhaustion, and longing for the weekend. Like a good shot of espresso, an inspiring quote can often inspire and perk me up, ready to take on what the rest of the day and week holds. Each Wednesday here on notsosimplestyle features a few bits of wisdom on varying topics, in the hopes you may find humor, inspiration, solace and affirmation.

Perhaps a cliché topic, love has been mused upon, dissected, and ultimately declared impossible to understand by the wisest of the ages. Yet, love's presence in life is undeniable. Regardless of the mystery involved, people continue to write, sing, act out love. While ten quotes hardly scratches the surface, at least it shines a light on the ever-changing face of love.

I have found the paradox that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

                       ~ Mother Teresa

Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible - it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.

                       ~ Barbara de Angelis

If we all discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to tell them that they loved them.

                       ~ Christopher Morley

Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones just as the wind blows out a candle and fans a fire.

                        ~ La Rochefoucauld

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

                        ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

                         ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

                         ~ Leo Buscaglia

Love is metaphysical gravity.

                         ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

                          ~ Henry Van Dyke

unlove's the heavenless hell and homeless home…lovers alone wear sunlight.

                       ~ e. e. cummings

The Eternal City: Part One

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions and the city of yearning.
                   ~ Giotto di Bondone

It seems like just yesterday that I was studying abroad. As winter comes to New York, I think back on the warm days of fall in Rome. Studying abroad was truly a life-changing experience and also where I first started to embrace my love of photography. While I have quite a few photos that I'd like to share, here is the first batch of some favorites.

Wisdom Wednesday: Change

Happy Wednesday! With Wednesday comes the inevitable "hump day" blues, sense of disillusionment, exhaustion, and longing for the weekend. Like a good shot of espresso, an inspiring quote can often inspire and perk me up, ready to take on what the rest of the day and week holds. Each Wednesday here on notsosimplestyle features a few bits of wisdom on varying topics, in the hopes you may find humor, inspiration, solace and affirmation.

As fall marches on towards winter, change is all around us. While the changing of the seasons may seem an obvious metaphor for cycles in life, overcoming struggles, and periods of rebirth; it is nonetheless apropos. I touched upon the beautiful uncertainty of your twenties in a previous Wisdom Wednesday but the notion of change as renewing and exciting as opposed to detrimental is a good idea, regardless your age. Below are some quotes about change, difficult and refreshing, for you and the world, showing us the true sacredness of the small deaths in life.


A permanent state of  transition is man's most noble condition.
                     ~Juan Ramon Jimenez


Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.
                     ~ Margaret Mead


All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.
                      ~ Anatole France

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

                      ~ Confucius

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.

                      ~ Carl Rogers

Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.

                       ~ Sydney J. Harris

We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.

                       ~ Harrison Ford

Sometimes it's the smallest decisions that can change your life forever.

                       ~ Keri Russell

Change, like sunshine, can be a friend or a foe, a blessing or a curse, a dawn or a dusk.

                       ~ William Arthur Ward

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

                        ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Photo Diary: Falling Leaves

With family visiting, I have spent a lot of days running around the city in all its fall glory. While the colors are fading to the bleakness of winter, there's still plenty of light to remind us of the beauty of fall. Hope you enjoy the pictures!