- ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS," my dad had told me a thousand times. But how else are you supposed to find what you're looking for?)
- 'was shaken by the revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. "Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!"' The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. / "Huh?" I asked. / "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
- "I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them."
- "You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart" As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden
- Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted to badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in the movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
- People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
- Hades to Persephone: "You're dead. Nothing can hurt you." (A Myth of Devotion, Loise Glück)
- Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.
- Find original source.
- 'Everything that comes together falls apart,' [...] Entropy increases. Things fall apart.
- Zen belief?
- If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
- I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter. and matter gets recycled. / But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska’s genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.
mar 17 2012 ∞
mar 25 2012 +
mar 25 2012 +