Samiha Tasnim
Depression is a side effect of dying.
I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.
“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—”will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.”
Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely.
All salvation is temporary.
No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.
“That's the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”
I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.
Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory.
I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace.
...and only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation...
“I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up,” he said. “And it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you.”
I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.
We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim—as you will be—of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.
“Omnis cellula e cellula,” he said again. “All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.”
All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.
Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered.
My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.
We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.
The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the
I'm pretty crazed about the cliff-hanger...probably gonna tear out half my hair from worry by the time the next installment of the series comes along!
We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high.
Sometimes you just need to go through a door.
I'd always known I was strange. I never dreamed I was peculiar.
I re-read this book again recently, and it reminded me why I loved the book the first time around.
The way I see it, Alaska Young is the personification of life. Any adjective you can think of for life, your life, my life, her life, his life, their life, life and lives in general...absolutely any adjective you can think of for life-it works for Alaska. That's why everyone loves Alaska so much, and it's also why sometimes they hate her so much too. You cannot really describe her, at least never completely or absolutely. If you try, you end up with a description of life-as YOU see it and feel it. I suppose in a way, Alaska helps us see ourselves better because of that.
Life is not perfect, hence Alaska is not perfect, and there's no point in either trying to make her everyone's favourite character OR judging her unduly harshly. We can no more understand Alaska than we can understand life, so we might as well take it all a moment at a time, a page at a time, while trying our best to stay true to ourselves by not letting the storms of life and the stormy character that is Alaska sweep us off our feet.
Lovely book. Among my favorites.
The murder part is quite easy and simple. It's the covering up that's so difficult. I mean, why should it be anyone else but you?
... if you can't go out to everything, then everything must be made to come to you.
Is there no such thing as an evil man, then, who can be described as great?
“Come, come,” said Venables. “I really can't go along with this modern playing down of evil as something that doesn't really exist. There is evil. And evil is powerful. Sometimes more powerful than good. It's there. It has to be recognised - and fought. Otherwise -“ he spread out his hands. “We go down to darkness.”
“Will machines take the place of men eventually?”
“Of men, yes. Men who are only units of manpower - that is. But Man, no. There has to be Man the Controller, Man the Thinker, who works out the questions to ask the machines.”
Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.
Warning: this text may contain spoilers “You will be fine,” the fortune-teller says. “There may be decisions to make, and surprises in store. Life takes us to unexpected places sometimes. The future is never set in stone, remember that.”
Most times things make sense eventually.
“Secrets have power,” Widget begins. “And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it's really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours. “This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit. It was inevitable, perhaps, but not unavoidable. Everyone makes mistakes.
So by losing his secrets, the wizard gained immortality.
“Is it not that bad to be trapped somewhere, then? Depending on where you're trapped?”
“I suppose it depends on how much you like the place you're trapped in,” Widget says.
“And how much you like whoever you're stuck there with,” Poppet adds.
I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.
“I do not mourn the loss of my sister because she will always be with me, in my heart,” she says. “I am, however, rather annoyed that my Tara has left me to suffer you lot alone. I do not see as well without her. I do not hear as well without her. I do not feel as well without her. I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister. Then at least she would be here to mock my appearance and claim to be the pretty one for a change. We have all lost our Tara, but I have lost a part of myself as well.”
I have had affairs that lasted decades and others that lasted hours. I have loved princesses and peasants. And I suppose they loved me, each in their way.
People don't pay much attention to anything unless you give them reason to.
By the time he reaches the farm, he is sure that the Bailey he is now is closer to the Bailey he is supposed to be than the Bailey he had been the day before. He may not be certain what any of it means, but for now he does not think that it much matters.
I am tired of everyone keeping their secrets so well that they get other people killed. We are all involved in your game, and it seems we are not as easily repaired as teacups.
“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held,” Celia says when he approaches her. “Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”
“You cannot stop things,” Celia says. “You can only be prepared for them to happen.”
The best we can do right now is take everything as it comes, and not worry ourselves over things that have happened, or things that are to come.
We lead strange lives, chasing our dreams around from place to place,”
“Our instructors do not understand how it is,” she says. “To be bound to someone in such a way. They are too old, too out of touch with their emotions. They no longer remember what it is to live and breathe within the world. They think it simple to pit any two people against each other. It is never simple. The other person becomes how you define your life, how you define yourself. They become as necessary as breathing. Then they expect the victor to continue on without that.”
Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it.
“I have been surrounded by love letters you two have built each other for years, encased in tents. It reminds me of what it was to be with her. It is wonderful and it is terrible. I am not yet prepared to give it up, but you are letting it fade.”
“You look like a ghost,” Bailey says. He can think of no better way to describe it.
“You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?”
You're not destined or chosen, I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it's not true. You're in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that's enough.
He will always choose the circus.
I find I think of myself not as a writer so much as someone who provides a gateway, a tangential route for readers to reach the circus. To visit the circus again, if only in their minds, when they are unable to attend it physically. I relay it through printed words on crumpled newsprint, words that they can read again and again, returning to the circus whenever they wish, regardless of time of day or physical location. Transporting them at will. When put that way, it sounds rather like magic, doesn't it? —FRIEDRICK THIESSEN, 189
“Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”
“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that.” He takes another sip of his wine. “There are many kinds of magic, after all.”
You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.
We are fine, Butler. That is to say that I, Artemis Fowl the Second, am one hundred percent functional, which is about five times the functionality of an average person. Or to put it another way: one point five Mozarts. Or three-quarters of a da Vinci.
“The odds are against us, as they have been so often, my friend,” he whispered, as much to himself as to Holly.
Perhaps we can win, he thought. But there will be no happy ending.
“We lost the crickets,” said Butler, causing Holly to break down in a splutter of hysterical giggles, which she stifled in her sopping sleeve.
“We lost the crickets,” she said. “Even you can't make that sound tough.”
Butler rubbed water from his close-cropped hair.
“I am Butler,” he said, straight-faced. “Everything I say sounds tough. Now, get out of the lake, fairy.”
... as his lawyer had once famously said, Three or four percent of the time my client was not a hundred percent accountable for the particular crime he was being accused of, which is to say that there were a significant number of incidents where Mr. Diggums's involvement in the said incidents was negligible even if he might have technically been involved in wrongdoing adjacent to the crime scene on a slightly different date than specified on the LEP warrant.
“Wow,” said Holly, watching arrows thunk into the nose and wings. “You didn't foresee a troll-riding dwarf pushing your plane down the runway. You must be losing your touch, Artemis.”
Artemis looked at Holly then and felt a tremendous affection for her. He wished that he could loop the past ten seconds and study it at a less stressful time so he could properly appreciate how fierce and beautiful his best friend was. Holly never seemed so vital as when she was balancing on the fine line between life and death. Her eyes shone and her wit was sharp. Whereas others would fall apart or withdraw, Holly attacked the situation with a vigor that made her glow. She is truly magical, thought Artemis. Perhaps her qualities are more obvious to me now that I have decided to sacrifice myself.
“Okay. Death cheated one more time. What's next, brainiac?”
There was no time. No time for anything but action. The fear had passed, and Artemis was still set on his course.
I can do it, he realized. I can think with my heart.
Some mornings,
it's hard to get
out of bed.
Sleep lures you
like a stranger
with a piece of candy.
Follow me.
It will be okay.
I promise.
You know better,
but still you follow,
because you really do
love candy.
I grab my backpack
containing
the essentials—
extra clothes,
just in case;
my drumsticks,
just because;
my camera,
just for fun;
and a box of jelly beans,
just like always.
Sometimes, love is loud.
Sometimes, love is quiet.
I lean back
into the cool leather seat,
close my eyes,
and let the music fill
all the empty spaces
Many times
when I read a book,
I want to savor
each word,
each phrase,
each page,
loving the prose
so much,
I don't want it
to end.
In the dark of the night,
hold on to the light,
and you'll get
back home safely.
It's like a dream.
The kind of dream
you wish for again and again,
night after night,
because it was so good
the first time.
I see you.
The real you.
The you who flips a coin,
hoping to understand
how fate works:
this choice or that choice,
ultimately leaving you
no choice at all.
He will survive.
Get better.
Thrive.
Or so they hope.
And suddenly I get it.
There isn't magic out there.
There is magic here.
Right here, in this place
that brought us together
the day before
we face our fears
and our lives change forever.
Magic in the jellies.
Magic in the lighthouse.
Magic in the music.
Magic in the kisses.
Magic in the glitter.
Magic in us.
What we need
will appear
right when we need it.
Just like it did
today
Why not believe most fervently in mortalkind and its potential? We, certainly, could benefit from a little dedication and discipline.
“And what does it make you to threaten all that they know and love?” She fell silent in confusion and growing anger, and I leaned close so that my breath would caress her cheek. “A monster too cowardly to accept her own hideousness.”
“It's just that mortals are dangerous to love. They break easily. In time, they die. It hurts.” I shrugged. “It's easier, safer, to just use them for pleasure. But that's hard, too, because it's impossible for us to take pleasure without giving back something of ourselves. We are not ...” I groped for the words in Senmite. “We do not ... It isn't our way. No, it isn't natural to do things that way, to be nothing but body, contained only within ourselves, so when we are with another, we reach out and the mortal gets inside us — we can not help it — and then it hurts to push them out, too ...” I trailed off, because Shahar was staring at me. I'd been talking faster and faster, the words tumbling together in my effort to convey how it felt. I sighed and forced myself back to human speed. “Being with mortals isn't anathema, but it's not good, either. It never ends well. Any god with sense avoids it.”
Only learning oneself better, and understanding one's place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.
So fascinating, this conversation. Our mouths moved, speaking about things neither of us cared about, a verbal mask for entirely different words that did not need to be said.
One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one's regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.
It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is the one who is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right. Right?
What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet.
Friends are precious, powerful things—hard to earn, harder still to keep.
Didn't we all need someone to turn to sometimes?
He was never good at changing, bending. He broke instead. And he took all of us with him.
I think you care about a great many things, more than you want to. I think life still holds some potential for you.
Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.
It was a hard thing, sometimes, to live.
That was all magic was, really, in the end. Possibility.
I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.
But the children knew, as I'm sure you know, that the worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind.
Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.
Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.
I'm sure you, in your life, have occasionally wished to be raised by different people than the ones who are raising you, but knew in your heart that the chances of this were very slim.
It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between “literally” and “figuratively.” If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it's happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.
But by immersing themselves in their favorite reading topics, they felt far away from their predicament, as if they had escaped.
There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.
They didn't understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.
This book turned out to be both better and worse than I expected.
I started out with really high expectations, hoping that with a theme such as it had. a young artist deported to Siberia in 1941 under Stalin's orders, would result in a really great read. I was expecting a strong piece of heart-wrenching writing that'd be like a window into the lives of some of the people who had to go through the hell of WWII. I didn't think it was too much to expect, which is why after the first few pages I was a little perturbed. There is something about the style of writing that doesn't sit well with me. I found myself reading a story that would've blown me away with its pain and brutality if it had only been written better. I was so disappointed, in fact, that if I were the type to put down books easily I'd have put this one down.
That is not to say that it's a bad book though, because the story was an interesting one. That is where the book was better than I expected – considering how much the style of writing unsettled me, I hadn't expected to like the story told, the bare happenings depicted. Yet I found that I liked them, that I found potential in it.
Overall, a book that could have been better, but isn't so bad if you expect little from it.
There isn't a murder type. People murder for too many different reasons.
....but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.
I am not to speak to you,
I am to think of you when
I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait,
I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
—Walt Whitman, “To a Stranger”
It's good in some ways, not to have a language. It makes you see things. You turn your attention, not to babbling about yourself, broadcasting each and every thought to everyone within earshot—as people often do—but to observing. That's how faeries became so empathic. We're so attuned to the beating of a heart, the varied thrum of a pulse, the zaps of the synapses of a brain, that we are almost inside others' minds.
The Englanders divided the endlessness of the world into seconds and minutes and hours, and Tik Tok thought this was wonderful.
The Englanders had the aging disease. As time went on they turned gray, and shrank, and, inexplicably, they died. It wasn't that Neverlanders didn't know anything about death, but not as a slow giving in, and certainly not an inevitability.
“But you have to be careful who you meet,” he said, stoking a pipe thoughtfully. “You can't unmeet them.”
You're restless. Everything is too small for you, including your own body.
Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.
Actually, I never get sad. It's a waste of time, don't you think?
A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime.
From above, the world looks orderly. That is one of the primary benefits of having wings. Being high shapes everything below into peaceful patterns. And even though you know there is chaos below, messiness everywhere, it is reassuring to sometimes think that it all eventually sorts itself out into something that looks elegant.
“I can't even hear what I'm thinking most of the time,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “My brain's noisy.”
To not do what you can to protect someone, that's cowardly.
She imagined souls roaming the tunnels of the clouds.
I am only a faerie. I don't have grand ideas, or grand dreams, or long for grand freedoms like people do. But I wanted to be part of their dream too, even if I was only a flea riding on their tails. To run and run and never worry—that was what they wanted, and I wanted to go with them.
And she felt defeated. Because she could not leave him. She couldn't give him up. All of the strength she'd always felt had gone into her arms so that she could hold Peter better. There was no getting it back from him.
As you may have guessed already, Peter had a soul that was always telling itself lies. When he was frightened, his soul told itself, “I'm not frightened.” And when something mattered that he couldn't control, Peter's soul told itself, “It doesn't matter.”
Sometimes I think that maybe we are just stories. Like we may as well just be words on a page, because we're only what we've done and what we are going to do.
Interdependence. Not just one thing leading to another in a straight line, but everything and everyone everywhere intersecting.
Has the world lost its joy? Is that why we're in such a mess?
Unicorns find it embarrassing to be thanked. Please desist.
Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.
“I don't have much experience with real people,” admitted Orion, slumping beside the centaur. “Or feelings that translate to the world. But I think I am sad now. And lonely. We have lost a friend.”
These were words from the heart, and Foaly felt he had to be sympathetic. “Okay. It's not your fault. We have both lost someone special.”
Orion sniffed. “Good. Then, worthy centaur, perhaps you could give me a ride to the village on your back. Then I can make a few pennies with my verses while you build us a shack and perform circus tricks for passersby.”
We're off again, I suppose?” said Mulch eventually. “Off on another save-the-world, nick-of-time, seat-of-the-pants adventure?”
“Artemis doesn't trust Myles and Beckett? That's just ridiculous. What terrible acts of sabotage are three-year-olds supposed to commit?”
Butler grimaced. “Unfortunately, Myles contaminated one of Artemis's petri dishes when he wanted a sample for his own experiments.”
“That's hardly industrial espionage. What did Beckett do?”
“He ate Artemis's hamster.”
For despite what some people say, love is not only a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away.
When one speaks ill of God, he speaks ill of himself.
“How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.”
Let us choose one another as companions! Let us sit at each other's feet! Inwardly we have many harmonies—think not That we are only what we see.
No matter who we are or where we live, deep inside we all feel incomplete. It's like we have lost something and need to get it back. Just what that something is, most of us never find out. And of those who do, even fewer manage to go out and look for it.
But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die.
Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour. It happens, and it happens all the time.
It is not the ceremonies or rituals that make a difference, but whether our hearts are sufficiently pure or not.
Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude is better for us, as it means being alone without feeling lonely. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person's heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every single dot is equally important for the entire picture.
Despite their seemingly endless differences, all of these people gave off a similar air of incompleteness, of the works in progress that they were, each an unfinished masterwork.
“Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify your heart.”
The whole universe is contained within a single human being—you. Everything that you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you in varying degrees. Therefore, do not look for Sheitan outside yourself either. The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within. If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright sides, you will arrive at a supreme form of consciousness. When a person knows himself or herself, he or she knows God.
If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.
We were all created in His image, and yet we were each created different and unique. No two people are alike. No two hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Therefore, disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others is tantamount to disrespecting God's holy scheme
How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.
...all religious wars were in essence a “linguistic problem.” Language, he said, did more to hide than reveal the Truth, and as a result people constantly misunderstood and misjudged one another. In a world beset with mistranslations, there was no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions were caused by a simple misunderstanding. In general, one shouldn't be too rigid about anything because “to live meant to constantly shift colors.”
Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.
“A man who has no time for stories is a man who has no time for God,” he said. “Don't you know that God is the best storyteller?”
...all I can give you is the present moment. That is all I have. But the truth is, no one has more than that. It is just that we like to pretend we do.
“It is never too late to ask yourself, ‘Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within?' “Even if a single day in your life is the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every moment and with each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way to be born into a new life: to die before death.”
By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans.
You need to keep walking, though there's no place to arrive at. The universe is turning, constantly and relentlessly, and so are the earth and the moon, but it is nothing other than a secret embedded within us human beings that makes it all move.
“A life without love is of no account. Don't ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, Eastern or Western.... Divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. “Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! “The universe turns differently when fire loves water.”
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Let it come in. We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in we'll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational act.'
Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too—even when you're in the dark. Even when you're falling.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
I don't want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what's happening, accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go.
Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth.
For me, Ted, living means I can be responsive to the other person. It means I can show my emotions and my feelings. Talk to them. Feel with them...
There were lifetimes in those eyes, none of them happy.
“I've found it useful,” I replied, “to be underestimated.”
... strength has always been the marker of beauty in my eyes.
We can never be gods, after all–but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
Theres truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.
When he was free, he was all things beautiful and terrible.
“MAELSTROM”
“Nothing can stay the same forever,” she said. “We were not made to be still.”
Age means nothing to us. What matters is staying true to ones nature.
“I'm tired of being what everyone else has made me,” I said. “I want to be myself.”
She always forgot how pain was so upsetting. Cruel. It hurt your feelings. You just wanted it to stop, please, right now.
Niceness doesn't cure anyone. Why don't you just bring me face-to-face with a few home truths?
Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together, even when they were foolishly thinking they could lead separate lives.
“Mmmmm.” They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream—excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.
This book really made me stop and think in a way few of my recent reads have. It was a strong, emotive story that had me in tears by the end.
The Days were a clan that mighta lived long
But Ben Day's head got screwed on wrong
That boy craved dark Satan's power
So he killed his family in one nasty hour
Little Michelle he strangled in the night
Then chopped up Debby: a bloody sight
Mother Patty he saved for last
Blew off her head with a shotgun blast
Baby Libby somehow survived
But to live through that ain't much a life
—SCHOOLYARD RHYME
I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.
Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.
Coffee goes great with sudden death.
I like other people's things better. They come with other people's history.
Stunted human beings who got awkward every time we tried to express ourselves.
And so you told the lie that they thought was the truth.
You gotta believe in something, right? Everyone has their thing.
“I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely,” I added.
“You talking about Mom?” Ben said.
“I was talking about me.”
“You could have been talking about all of us.”