- “In the wrong light anyone can look like a darkness.”
- “Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are.”
- “I am not afraid of an argument. Get emotional. Get angry. Spit language venom. Be unrelenting and cruel with your words if you feel you have to be. Because above all else I am terrified of the silence — of things becoming so bad between us there is no longer anything left worth fighting over.”
- “I am an incurable romantic. I believe in hope, dreams and decency, love tenderness and kindness. I believe in mankind.”
- “i want to be overthrown or undone, stunned by something i’d never heard before or i’d ever thought of. it could be music freed of meaning, or clunky meaning, or feeling with or without image. or honesty or lies or etcetera. i want it to spin against the way it drives. i want friction and tension. the poet jack gilbert said poetry can move the fulcrum of the mind just enough so that the world becomes electrified and bewildering. that’s what i want. just get me there.”
- I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.
- Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one…one was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood. Big dreams. Oh, I left that part out. Sorry, that should have come before. They were all dreamers, these girls.
- At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.
- “Life is going to present to you a series of transformations. And the point of education should be to transform you. To teach you how to be transformed so you can ride the waves as they come. But today, the point of education is not education. It’s accreditation. The more accreditation you have, the more money you make. That’s the instrumental logic of neoliberalism. And this instrumental logic comes wrapped in an envelope of fear. And my Ivy League, my MIT students are the same. All I feel coming off of my students is fear. That if you slip up in school, if you get one bad grade, if you make one fucking mistake, the great train of wealth will leave you behind. And that’s the logic of accreditation. If you’re at Yale, you’re in the smartest 1% in the world. […] And the brightest students in the world are learning in fear. I feel it rolling off of you in waves. But you can’t learn when you’re afraid. You cannot be transformed when you are afraid.”
- Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.
- The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.
- We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
- “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”
- "The great lesson from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists – that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's back yard ... To be looking elsewhere for miracles is to me a sure sign of ignorance that everything is sacred."
- "When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelming events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at an end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history."
- "Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
- "Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey."
- "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
- “I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”
- Just because one person rejects you doesn't mean you need to reject yourself.
- Frank was like that. His ears and eyes and heart were tuned to seek truth in place where other people didn’t look. In this, and in so many other ways, she felt a kindred spirit to him.
- "The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room."
- “We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.”
- Even amidst flames, the golden lotus can be planted
- "I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?"
- "No matter who weaves in and out of your life, regardless of the quality of those deep friendships and familyships, I'm the only common denominator at this point who's been with me the whole time. And there's this sense of trying to make sense of that ultimate solitude. It's not a negative or even a positive. It's just a fact."
- "I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. And the great divide between the beautiful and the ugly will cease to be. Because we are all what we choose.”
- "My best friend’s mother once told me something that always stuck with me. When discussing marriage, you must figure out if you see eye to eye on three things: Sex, politics, and religion. If you don’t, you probably shouldn’t be together."
- "But I think it’s intoxicating when somebody is so unapologetically who they are."
- Journalist: Do you feel, however, that we’re making progress in this country? Malcolm X: No, no. I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that’s not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit that the knife is there!
- "Music is a total constant. That’s why we have such a strong visceral connection to it, you know? Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song says the same, just like that moment."
- "She was at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so intelligent. She also was intensely private. What she knew best was how it felt to be alone, unique, isolated. She was lacking in the sense of a solid communal life; what bound people together escaped her. What separated them was an object of wonder, delight and despair. She seemed as detached from herself as from everyone else."
- " Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."
- "I want to taste glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love."
- "And how well I remember the endless pounding, squeezing pain. When you seemingly drown in your own perspiration, when your teeth ache from incessant clenching, when your tongue floats in your mouth and bombs explode back of your eyeballs; when darkness and light fuse into one hue of gray; when day becomes night and night becomes day and time stands still- and all that matters is that ugly pain. The scars of pain are not easily erased."
- "What would you suggest: that we hunt it down with one and a half swords to our names? This life is filled with threats and danger. We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for a greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live, and one life to give. There is no glory in throwing it away where there is no hope.”
- "As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment. Then gradually time awakened again and moved sluggishly on."
- "Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone."
- "Who knows what true happiness is, not the conventional word.. but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, that wears a mask, the most miserable outcast hugs some memory.. or some illusion."
- 'Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away.. and in the end.. there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometime we lose them there again.'
- 'He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream, and he sometimes wondered whose it was, and whether they were enjoying it.'
- "The journey lasted eight months. Sometimes I traveled alone, sometimes, there were others who took the wheel -- and took my heart. But when the destination was reached, it wasn’t me who arrived...it wasn't me at all."
- 'We all live in a house of fire. No fire department to call. No way out. Just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down… with us trapped, locked in it.'
- "Does this darkness have a name? This cruelty, this hatred. How did it find us? Did it steal into our lives or did we seek it out and embrace it? What happened to us? That we now send our children into the world like we send young men into war, hoping for their safe return. But knowing that some will be lost along the way. When did we lose our way? Consumed by the shadows, swallowed whole by the darkness. Does this darkness have a name? Is it your name?"
- "Most of our life is a series of images. They pass us by like towns on the highway. But sometimes a moment stuns us as it happens. And we know that this instant is more than a fleeting image. We know that this moment, every part of it, will live on forever."
- "You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants."
- "And on and on it went--that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man who was so full of loving echoes."
- "This was the world in which she grew and he aged. They made for themselves a sanctuary from Trachimbrod, a habitat completely unlike the rest of the world. No hateful words were ever spoken, and no hands raised. More than that, no angry words were ever spoken, and nothing was denied. But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn't have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
- "They reciprocated the great and saving lie - that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things - willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life."
- "But, once in a while, people push onto something better. Something found just beyond the pain of going it alone. And just beyond the bravery and courage it takes to let someone in. Or to give someone a second chance. Something beyond the quiet persistence of a dream. Because, it's only when you’re tested that you truly discover who you are. And, it's only when you're tested that you discover who you can be. The person you want to be does exist; somewhere on the other side of hard work and faith and belief. And, beyond the heartache and fear of what lies ahead."
- "And, of course when faced with the unknown, most of us prefer to turn around and go back."
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- "Maybe it's a lot like your world. Maybe it's nothing like it. But, if you look closely you might see someone like you. Someone trying to find their way; someone trying to find their place; someone trying to find their self. Sometimes it’s easy to feel like you’re the only one in the world who's struggling, who’s frustrated, or unsatisfied at barely getting by. But, that feeling is a lie and if you just hold on; just find the courage to face it all for another day, someone or something will find the way and make it all okay. Because we all need a little help sometimes, someone to help us hear the music in the world. To remind us that it won’t always be this way. That someone is out there, and that someone will find you."
- "Stepping up. It's a simple concept. It basically means to rise above yourself; to do a little more, to show you something special. Something like this. Lucas is gone, but that doesn't mean the season is over. As a matter of fact, I say it's just beginning. You might want to stay out of my way for a while. Life's funny sometimes; can push pretty hard like when you fall in love with someone but they forget to love you back, like when your best friend and your boyfriend leave you alone, like when you pull the trigger or light the flame and you can't take it back. Like I said, in sports they call this 'stepping up'. In life, I call it 'pushing back"
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- "You know it's been said that we just don't recognize the significant moments of our lives while they're happening. We grow complacent with ideas, or things or people and we take them for granted and it's usually not until that thing is about to be taken away from you that you've realized how wrong you've been that you realized how much you need it, how much you love it. God, I love this game."
- "You ever heard the expression 'The best things in live are free.' Well that expression is true.' Every once in a while, people step up they rise above themselves sometimes they surprise you and sometimes they fall short. Life is funny sometimes. It can push pretty hard but if you look close enough, you can find hope in the words of children, in the bars of the song and in the eyes of someone you love. And if you're lucky, if you're the luckiest person on this entire planet, the person you love decides to love you back."
- "We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
- "All at once I understood that it had only been my illusion that we ourselves saddle events and control their course; the truth is that they aren't our stories at all, that they are foisted on us from somewhere outside; that in no way do they represent us; that we are not to blame for the strange paths they follow; that they are themselves directed from who knows where by who knows what strange forces."
- "There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because sketch means an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture."
- "For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
- "Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
- "And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words."
- "Sometimes even broken glass, cracked cement, sad lives; well they seem like the good dreams of bad things."
- "There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality."
- "If you believe something, passionately, people will follow you. People hardly care what you believe, as long as you believe something. If you are passionate about something, people will follow you because they think you know something they don't, some clue to the meaning of the universe. Passion is tricky though, because it can point to nothing as easily as it points to something. ... What people believe is important. What people believe is more important than how they look, what their skills are, or their degree of passion. Passion about nothing is like pouring gasoline in a car without wheels. It isn't going to lead anybody anywhere."
- "We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. … Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute."
- "She never had power to conceal her passion, it always set her whole complexion in a blaze."
- "Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending to one."
- "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him."
- "I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."
- "Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come."
- "I have dealt at length with my teachers because this was my introduction to the nature of what is commonly called thought. Through them I discovered that thought is often full of unconscious prejudice, ignorance and hypocrisy. It will lecture on disinterested purity while its neck is being remorselessly twisted toward a skirt. Technically, it is about as proficient as most businessmen's golf, as honest as most politicians' intentions, or--to come near my own preoccupation--as coherent as most books that get written. It is what I came to call grade-three thinking, though more properly, it is feeling, rather than thought."
- "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
- "I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of our life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance."
- "Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. An that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house--the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture-- must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for."
- "History's smell. Like old roses on a breeze. It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes."
- "You know what I think?" "Yes. No." "I think everyone should be able, just once, to make an inanimate object come to life and be his pal." I have to pause. Should he be encouraged? "Like what?" I ask, nervously. "Like an orange." He scratches his chin, something he actually does when thinking these kinds of thoughts. "Or a hammer."
- "With that cold feeling on a hot afternoon that Life had been Lived. That her cup was full of dust. That the air, the sky, the trees, the sun, the rain, the light and darkness were all slowly turning to sand. That sand would fill her nostrils, her lungs, her mouth. Would pull her down, leaving on the surface a spinning swirl like crabs leave when they burrow downwards on a beach."
- "..besides which Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
- "I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so —this has always been my dream— so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while the children sleep."
- "‘What about dignity?’ You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it."
- "I felt so detached sometimes, went for weeks at a time without really being around people my age, like living in a country where no one understands your words."
- "I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I’d lose my mind."
- "It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness."
- "It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness."
- "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
- "Some women are strong enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your belief in me."
- "I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of peoples eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth."
- "He laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection."
- "The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of clouds, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see trees and grassland waist-high under flood water--as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase."
- "How can I put this? There’s a kind of gap between what I think is real and what’s really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me… like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a closet… and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I’ve established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy."
- “Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really.”
- "The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you're supposed to go up and down when you're supposed to go down. When you're supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there's no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up."
- "Music. A flower in a vase on the tray. A January rose, it wouldn’t last long, all big and full-blown like that. He loved things like this, fragile, that wouldn’t last. She touched its silver-mauve petals, a hundred layers like an old-fashioned petticoat."
- "I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens."
- "Wish on everything. Pink cars are good, especially old ones. And stars of course, first stars and shooting stars. Planes will do if they are the first light in the sky and look like stars. Wish in tunnels, holding your breath and lifting your feet off the ground. Birthday candles. Baby teeth. "
- "For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."
- "Listeners, listeners out there, listeners out in the vacant night clinging to my voice as a simulacrum of companionship, remember: fear is just consciousness, plus life. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. Toast is bread, held under direct heat until crisp. The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy. And the past tense of toast is toasted."
- "Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder."
- "For what ever we lost (like a you or a me), it's always ourselves we find in the sea."
- "So, little Amelie. Your bones aren’t made of glass. You can take life’s knocks. If you let this chance go by, eventually your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton."
- “People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
oct 17 2015 ∞
may 25 2021 +