Samiha Tasnim
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.”
When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.
“A witch,” I said. “With unbound power. Who need answer to none but herself.”
Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.
“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure you do not dishonor me.”
“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”
It was so simple. If you want it, I will do it. If it would make you happy, I will go with you. Is there a moment that a heart cracks?
He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.
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...
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.
I said: Pain and sorrow. He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you. —Rumi
You're a Herondale. Which, by the way, means that not only are you part of a stunningly good-looking family, but you're also part of a fam- ily that owns a lot of valuable property, including a London town house and a manor in Idris, which you're probably entitled to part of. You know, if you were interested.
Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes.
“What's the Nephilim motto again?”
“‘We are dust and shadows,'” said Ty, not looking up from his book.
“Some of us are very handsome dust,” Jace added.
“Come to the library,” she announced. “The tentacle is starting to dissolve.” “You drive me wild with your sexy talk,” said Jace, pulling on his gear jacket.
“I'll crash the wedding,” Emma suggested. “I'll jump out of the cake, but not in a sexy way. Like, with grenades.”
“Didn't you just all catch a murderer?”
“Malcolm sent a note,” Ty said in a withering tone, as if he were disappointed that Malcolm had ruined crime-solving with his confession. “And then he admitted he did it.”
“That does rather narrow down the list of suspects,” Kit said.
You want to live. Just like everyone else does. You don't want to be trapped, is all.
We fear things because we value them. We fear losing people because we love them. We fear dying because we value being alive. Don't wish you didn't fear anything. All that would mean is that you didn't feel anything.
The world isn't the way you want it to be. It's the way it is.
“Magnus Bane,” said Barnabas, with clear loathing. “The Ultimate Traitor.”
“Not my favorite nickname,” Magnus said, gently wiggling his fingers in Barnabas's direction. “I prefer ‘Our Lord and Master' or maybe ‘Unambiguously the Hottest.' ”
That is the problem with revenge—you wind up destroying the innocent as well as the guilty.
It was dangerous to dream, he reminded himself.
“People often run even when they have nowhere to go,” said Cristina. “It is all about what you can bear in the place where you are.”
“Do you know why I'm sure?” he whispered, kissing her temple, her cheek where it tasted like salt. “Because when this universe was born, when it blasted into existence in fire and glory, everything that would ever exist was created. Our souls are made of that fire and glory, of the atoms of it, the fragments of stars. Everyone's are, but I believe ours, yours and mine, are made from the dust of the same star. That's why we've always been drawn to each other like magnets, all our lives. All the pieces of us belong together.”
Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
True terror isn't being scared; it's not having a choice in the matter.
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
“I don't mind worriers,” I said. “Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”
And if you can't pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren't really real, you know? Maybe I'm just a lie that I'm whispering to myself.
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.” —ROBERT FROST
When I was little, I knew monsters weren't, like, real. But I also knew I could be hurt by things that weren't real. I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you.
I don't understand why he's so stuck inside himself, when there is this endlessness to fall into.
It's so weird, to know you're crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It's not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can't figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can't be sure, you know?
In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren't even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.
You're a we. You're a you. You're a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I.
You are like pizza, which is the highest compliment I can pay a person.
I'm doing my best, but I can't stay sane for you, okay?
You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.
Imagine you're trying to find someone, or even you're trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You're senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you're not, and you're floating around in a body with no control. You don't get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You're just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That's scary.
The problem with happy endings,” I said, “is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.
Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first. Originality consists of returning to the origin. —ANTONI GAUDÍ
There is only one way to triumph over death, and that is by making our lives masterpieces. We must seize every opportunity to show kindness and to love fully
Entropy is just a fancy way of saying: things fall apart.
We live in an entropic universe,” she said, “a world whose physical laws randomize, not organize.
“Nature—in an effort to promote disorder—creates little pockets of order. These pockets are structures that escalate the chaos of a system, and they thereby increase entropy.”
To efficiently create chaos, Langdon realized, requires some order.
May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change.
Love is not a finite emotion. We don't have only so much to share. Our hearts create love as we need it.
Merged review:
Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first. Originality consists of returning to the origin. —ANTONI GAUDÍ
There is only one way to triumph over death, and that is by making our lives masterpieces. We must seize every opportunity to show kindness and to love fully
Entropy is just a fancy way of saying: things fall apart.
We live in an entropic universe,” she said, “a world whose physical laws randomize, not organize.
“Nature—in an effort to promote disorder—creates little pockets of order. These pockets are structures that escalate the chaos of a system, and they thereby increase entropy.”
To efficiently create chaos, Langdon realized, requires some order.
May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change.
Love is not a finite emotion. We don't have only so much to share. Our hearts create love as we need it.
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.
It might have made sad sense.
It's just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.
Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve.
Not everyone has a sob story, Charlie, and even if they do, it's no excuse.
And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.
I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.
I guess what I'm saying is that this all feels very familiar. But it's not mine to be familiar about.
I don't know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like. It's much easier not to know things sometimes.
Not because she's a bad person or shallow or mean. But because things change. And friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody.
I want to make him stop hurting, but I can't. So, I just follow him around whenever he wants to show me his world.
“I would die for you. But I won't live for you.”
I was very grateful to have heard it again. Because I guess we all forget sometimes. And I think everyone is special in their own way. I really do.
There's something about that tunnel that leads to downtown. It's glorious at night. Just glorious. You start on one side of the mountain, and it's dark, and the radio is loud. As you enter the tunnel, the wind gets sucked away, and you squint from the lights overhead. When you adjust to the lights, you can see the other side in the distance just as the sound of the radio fades to nothing because the waves just can't reach. Then, you're in the middle of the tunnel, and everything becomes a calm dream. As you see the opening get closer, you just can't get there fast enough. And finally, just when you think you'll never get there, you see the opening right in front of you. And the radio comes back even louder than you remember it. And the wind is waiting. And you fly out of the tunnel onto the bridge. And there it is. The city. A million lights and buildings and everything seems as exciting as the first time you saw it. It really is a grand entrance.
I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.
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.
Life is short, and wisdom long to learn.
Thanatos
Hate for hate. They are an old people and that is their idea of justice.
The world was extra intense for Ty, Julian had always said. It was as if his ears could hear more clearly, his eyes see more, and sometimes it was too much for him. He needed to cover noise, to feel something in his hand to distract him. He needed to rock back and forth to soothe himself. Everyone processed stress in a different way, Julian said. This was Ty's, and it hurt nobody.
“I keep you around because I need an audience for my witty remarks,” she said as they reached the gates and Jules took out his stele to draw an Open rune. The gate popped open.
Julian turned sideways to slide through the opening. “What witty remarks?”
“Oh, you are going to pay for that,” Emma muttered, following him. “I am incredibly witty.”
“Because when someone—shoots you with an arrow—” he gasped, “your immediate response is not—‘Thanks for the arrow, I think I'll keep it for a while.'”
“Why are you wearing a T-shirt under your other T-shirt?” Livvy asked, temporarily diverted.
“In case one of them is stolen,” Mark said, as if this were entirely normal.
“You don't want him,” she said to the pink-haired girl. “He has syphilis.”
The girl stared. “Syphilis?”
“Five percent of people in America have it,” said Ty helpfully.
“I do not have syphilis,” Mark said angrily. “There are no sexually transmitted diseases in Faerieland!”
“It isn't easy, having the Sight, if you don't know others who do,” Julian said in a low voice. “You see things nobody else sees. You can't talk about it because no one will understand. You have to keep secrets, and secrets—they break you apart. Cut you open. Make you vulnerable.”
Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes.
The choices we make, make us.
There was beauty in the idea of freedom, but it was an illusion. Every human heart was chained by love.
People are more than one thing.
He was definitely smiling now, his mouth curved in amusement. She couldn't quite tell if it was human amusement or the amusement of Faerie, which thrived on chaos.
Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.
It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about. It's also about (giving in) waiting. Just sitting...and looking out over those dreamy waters...and waiting. It's coming, you think. It's coming soon, I know it is. But you don't know exactly what and so the years pass.
I think most kids have a place they go to when they're scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or the Shire, Boo'ya Moon if they've got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget.
She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.
So many long nights when the mind of something...other...might turn to a person, if that person could not keep her mind from turning to it. And how, exactly, did you keep from doing that? How did you not think of somethin?
For to be brave about a thing like that, you must first be sorry. And how could I be sorry, for someone I never knew?
But tonight, all things are out of their order, all my patterns have been disturbed. My liberty beckons: gaugeless, fearful, inevitable as death.
But there are as many different ways of being mad, after all, as there are of being crooked.
Some were perfect maniacs. Two or three, like Betty, were only simpletons. One liked to shout bad words. Another threw fits. The rest were only miserable: they walked, with their eyes on the floor, and sat and turned their hands in their laps, and mumbled, and sighed.
But you see, I'm afraid you must be mad, since you are here. There is something queer about us all. You need only look about you. You need only look at yourself.
A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
JACK LONDON, WHITE FANG
I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often.
“He was alone,” as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.
I'd like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
I now walk into the wild.
Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty
I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly.
II grew up exuberant in body but with a nervy, craving mind. It was wanting something more, something tangible. It sought for reality intensely, always as if it were not there... But you see at once what I do. I climb.
JOHN MENLOVE EDWARDS, “LETTER FROM A MAN”
I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt.
But we little know until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the judgement forbid as it may.
JOHN MUIR, THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.
At that stage of my youth, death remained as abstract a concept as non-Euclidean geometry or marriage. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts. I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn't resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle that was no less compelling than the sweet, hidden petals of a woman's sex.
Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.
RODERICK NASH, WILDERNESS AND THE AMERICAN MIND
TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. ANAESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, ‘CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST. “ AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION. TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD.
ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP MAY1992
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor—such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps—what more can the heart of a man desire?
Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or to be buried in,— no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,— the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place of heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we... What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “KTAADN”
I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? HENRY DAVID THOREAU, “KTAADN”
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one's neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modem man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea offree personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.
BORIS PASTERNAK, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO - PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND WITH CHRISTOPHER MCCANDLESS'S REMAINS;UNDERSCORING BY MCCANDLESS
For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom.
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 was the one who was fragile, though I didn't know at the time just how easy it would be for me to SHATTER.”
(Chapter:When he saw Brianna)
“But then I remember she's not my friend anymore. So why do I still care?”
(Chapter:Out The Window)
“That's what Ms. Lane, my writing teacher, would say. Spill it out onto the page. Sometimes it's the only way for thoughts heavy as bricks to become feathers and fly away.”
(Chapter:Write It Out)
“I wonder— if I found a mask, put it on, and tied it fast, would I be okay again?”
(Chapter:Elijah Wears Black)
“It seemed to me that only words and rhymes made any sense. Only they were safe. Nouns and verbs constructed in straight lines made the world a saner, safer place.”
(Chapter:The Bell Rings)
“I never really felt alive unless I was up onstage. It's like that old saying, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” If I'm here but nobody sees me, am I really alive?”
(Chapter:A Christmas Carol)
“THERE'S SOMETHING DARK in the corner of the hallway, but every time I try to look, it disappears. There's something cold in the corner of the hallway, but every time I go to check it out, it moves away. There's something talking to me from the corner of the hallway. I can't see what it is, but I lean in close to listen. I used to hear voices in the halls, whispering things like slut, liar, whore I hear voices on the H Hall, too, even though there's nobody here but me. They're telling me this is the only place where Nobody can touch me. Nobody can hurt me. Nobody can reach me. “You can stay here forever,” they whisper.”
(Chapter:There's Something Dark)
“To be friendless in a crowd is the worst kind of loneliness.”
(Chapter:Third Lunch)
“Looks like I will spend the whole day on the hallway. Watching other kids, wondering if their lives are hopeless and screwed up like mine.”
(Chapter:I'm Definitely)
“But I don't get to write your story. I must leave that up to you. I just hope you understand, it isn't through.”
(Chapter:The Stage)
“THINGS THAT FALL Night falls. Water falls. Snow falls, soft and wet, gathering on tree branches and dirty streets. People fall in love, out of love, to sleep. Sometimes they even fall from rooftops. And sometimes they j u m p”
(Chapter:Things That Fall)
““If you're all suicides, then what's your story?” I ask the Hangman. “You don't seem like the self-destructive type.” “I'm not,” he replies. “I fell. Unfortunately I had a rope around my neck at the time.” “Who put it there?” I ask. “I did. But I didn't want to die. I just wanted to get somebody's attention. You know all about that, don't you, Ally?””
(Chapter:How it Happened)
“I feel my life unraveling like yarn. The strands come loose, and then they fly away. What happens when I reach the end of it? Make a knot and hold on, or let go?”
(Chapter:Dear Frank)
“When you missed that curve, did it cross your mind, that I might be following behind?”
(Chapter:Follow the Leader)
“and I wonder how people have the guts to stay so long on such an angry planet. “
(Chapter:The Residents of ICU)
“We're all a little ruined, I guess”
(Chapter:When We Leave)
“The real job will be finding out who I am inside, because that's all I've got left”
(Chapter:My Body)
I had too much left unfinished—my soul was full of unfulfilled desires and yearnings.
My heart was too full, my thoughts a storm of paper fragments.
For all who have seen ghosts and spirits are marked with a stain...
Haunted, I chafe at the tight orbit of mahjong parties that I once thought so glamorous, and glance over my shoulder for wind and shadows, yearning for the forbidden.
When Er Lang comes for his answer, I will tell him that I've always thought he was a monster. And that I want to be his bride.
I know things. People don't know as I know things. They don't think I've listened and they don't think I'd remember, but I know sometimes–you know, they'll say something and then they'll say who else knows about it and then they'll–well, you know, if you keep quiet you get to hear a lot.
It's a kind of technique, you know. We've taught it to ourselves in the last, oh, say fifty to a hundred years. Taught that if people cohere together and make a tight little mob of themselves, it's amazing what they are able to accomplish and what they are able to inspire other people to accomplish for them.
