Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.

My family is mostly a chosen one. I've managed to invite some really amazing people into my life and they become family. Brothers, sisters, siblings, mentors, role models. And I like to live that way, where your family bleeds out into the larger community.

Now, certain things are gone forever-beautiful and ugly things. But the world has not ended yet, and I've chosen to look back on the past without longing, without regret, without hate.

Isn't that what every girl dreamed? That she'd wake and find herself a princess? or blessed with magical powers and a grand destiny. Maybe there were people who lived those lives, maybe this girl was one of them but what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns, we learn to ring magic from the ordinary, that's how you survived when you weren't chosen, when there was no royal bloods in your veins, when the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway!

Even when we do not actively participate in our destiny, we are still on a chosen path. Life has a way of making decisions for us.

Don't fret my dear. If art is translation of the ephemeral into observable form, then always remember that it is the translationn that is the craft. The craft is that which can always be improved. But the ephemeral is that which only you have been able to observe, and that which only you have chosen to translate, and so in a way, the ephemeral is you, and it is already beautiful.

But then, life is a constant withering of possibilities. Some are stolen with the lives of people you love. Others are let go, with regret and reluctance and deep, deep sorrow. But there is compensation for lives unlived in the intoxicating joy of knowing that the life you have - right here, right now - if the one you have chosen. There is power in that, and hope.

"You didn't chose to be in the situation or environment you are in right now.

You have been hurt, and you have hurt. You are no stranger to pain, anger or fear. Even so, you have given grace to others, and you have been shown forgiveness yourself. And that is what makes you so beautiful, I think. You have had every reason to give up, but you still chose love.

Each day is a new opportunity. I chose to make this day a great one.

"I chose to forgive. I chose to stay vigilant to any signs of anger or hate in my heart. They took thiry years of my life. If I couldn't forgive, if I couldn't feel joy, that would be like giving them the rest of my life.

Mon Dieu donne-moi la s?r?nit? d'accepter toutes les choses que je ne peux changer. Donne-moi le courage de changer les choses que je peux changer et la sagesse d'en conna?tre la diff?rence.

No one should ever despair because the entrance to his or her chosen career path is clogged. There is an ancient saying: "The persistent drip wears through stone.

Bad luck with women is a determined man's road to success. For every affliction, he makes, out of indignation, yet another advancement in order to exceed the man that the woman chose over him. This goes to show that great men are made great because they once learned how to fight the feeling of rejection.

But God decided to create a world where free will was more important than no one ever getting hurt. There must be something stunningly beautiful and remarkable about free will that only God can truly grasp, because God hates, literally abhors, evil, yet He created a world where evil could happen if people chose it.

There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Bountiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxi cation so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway? Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.

He ran as he'd never run before, with neither hope nor despair. He ran because the world was divided into opposites and his side had already been chosen for him, his only choice being whether or not to play his part with heart and courage. He ran because fate had placed him in a position of responsibility and he had accepted the burden. He ran because his self-respect required it. He ran because he loved his friends and this was the only thing he could do to end the madness that was killing and maiming them.

The quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor.

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

"Your soul is a chosen landscape

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

Love confirms hope and rejects cynicism, and he chose cynicism over love.

How many times have we set the stage for our greatest defeats? And how many times did victory elude us because we chose to deny that fact?