Samiha Tasnim
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.
We begin just as any witch or wizard on his or her way to Hogwarts would – at London's King's Cross. It's a bustling, cavernous train station filled with busy commuters – so busy that they don't notice people laden with trunks, owls, cats and robes run at a ticket barrier and disappear.
... just as the human mind cannot comprehend time, so it cannot comprehend the damage that will ensue if we presume to tamper with its laws.
THE BALLAD OF NEARLY HEADLESS NICK BY J.K. ROWLING
It was a mistake any wizard could make
Who was tired and caught on the hop
One piffling error, and then, to my terror, I found myself facing the chop.
Alas for the eve when I met Lady Grieve
A-strolling the park in the dusk!
She was of the belief I could straighten her teeth
Next moment she'd sprouted a tusk.
I cried through the night that I'd soon put her right
But the process of justice was lax;
They'd brought out the block, though they'd mislaid the rock
Where they usually sharpened the axe.
Next morning at dawn, with a face most forlorn,
The priest said to try not to cry,
‘You can come just like that, no, you won't need a hat,'
And I knew that my end must be nigh.
The man in the mask who would have the sad task
Of cleaving my head from my neck,
Said ‘Nick, if you please, will you get to your knees,'
And I turned to a gibbering wreck.
‘This may sting a bit' said the cack-handed twit
As he swung the axe up in the air,
But oh the blunt blade!
No difference it made,
My head was still definitely there.
The axeman he hacked and he whacked and he thwacked,
‘Won't be too long', he assured me,
But quick it was not, and the bone-headed clot
Took forty-five goes 'til he floored me.
And so I was dead, but my faithful old head
It never saw fit to desert me,
It still lingers on, that's the end of my song,
And now, please applaud, or you'll hurt me.
“... But why Blenkensop?”
“Why not?”
“It seems such an odd name to choose.”
“It was the first one I thought of and it's handy for underclothes.”
“What do you mean, Tuppence?”
“B, you idiot. B for Beresford, B for Blenkensop. Embroidered on my cami-knickers. Patricia Blenkensop. Prudence Beresford. Why did you choose Meadowes? It's a silly name.”
“To begin with,” said Tommy, “I don't have large B's embroidered on my pants... “
“It's an odd life this service of ours. We respect our adversaries and they respect us. You usually like your opposite number, you know - even when you're doing your best to down him.”
There was a silence as Tommy thought over the strange anomaly of war.
Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred in my heart.
Short snore, short snore, short snore - pause - long snore, long snore, long snore - pause - short snore, short snore, short snore...
It's got to be the way things tear you to pieces... It's got to be sorrow and bitterness and dust and ashes.
“Cut out the compliments,” said Tuppence. “I'm admiring myself a good deal, so there's no need for you to chime in.”
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.
Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.
“I don't want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I'll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that's worth holding on to?”
That was a story, too; they all had stories. They had mothers or fathers, sisters or lovers. They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse.
That's the thing, isn't it? About friendships. You don't know what he needs. You only know he needs it.
You — the three of you — you shone, you know? You liked each other. You had fun. I envied you those friendships more than anything else.
I think you have to make a choice — at a certain point — of the man you want to be. And I tell you that at that time you need a parent or a friend. And if you've learnt to hate your parent by then and you have no friends . . . then you're all alone. And being alone — that's so hard.
Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.
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.
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 here, I said, and it felt shockingly comforting, those words. When I'm panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I'm here. I don't usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my way and I'd be disappeared forever, not even a sliver of fingernail left behind. On some days, I find this thought calming; on others it chills me.
“I can be nice, you know?” she said, her brow still furrowed. She seemed on the edge of tears herself.
“I know. It's just that I'm wondering why you've decided to be nice to me now.”
“Sometimes I can't. But right now, I can. When everyone's asleep and everything's quiet, it's easier.”
“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story . . . —Virginia Woolf
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” Virginia Woolf
“She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged.” Virginia Woolf
“Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know.” Virginia Woolf
“I am rooted, but I flow.” Virginia Woolf
I am an old done man, grown giddy as a child again.
“I am sorry for your loss as well, Joffrey,” the dwarf said.
“What loss?”
“Your royal father? A large fierce man with a black beard; you'll recall him if you try. He was king before you.”
Was there ever a war where only one side bled?
Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”
“So power is a mummer's trick?”
“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
“There are ghosts everywhere,” Ser Jorah said softly. “We carry them with us wherever we go.”
“Because it will not last,” Catelyn answered, sadly. “Because they are the knights of summer, and winter is coming.”
Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading.
It is not what we do, so much as why we do it.
“Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.”
“A grey man,” she said. “Neither white nor black, but partaking of both.”
There are no shadows in the dark. Shadows are the servants of light, the children of fire. The brightest flame casts the darkest shadows.
I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
She walked fast, to keep ahead of her fear.
Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.
She was nicknamed The Graveyard. Any secret, any piece of confidential information, personal or otherwise, that went in never, ever came back out. You knew you were safe; you knew you would never be judged or, if you were it would be silently, so you'd never know. She was perfectly named with a birth name that meant consistency and fortitude, and she was appropriately nicknamed; she was solid, permanent and steady, stoic but oddly comforting.
There are more people involved in telling a story than the writer, and you know that.
‘You look far away.'
‘I was thinking.'
‘I shall alert the authorities at once.'”
“...but sometimes when people are involved, business has to stop being business and the human must win.”
But I was never the brave one. Why it should fall upon me to become that now is beyond me.
‘It's very simple. If you were to randomly select one hundred people from a phone directory, you would not only find a story, you would find one hundred stories, because everybody, every single person, has a story to tell. Every single ordinary person has an extraordinary story. We might all think that we are unremarkable, that our lives are boring, just because we aren't doing ground-breaking things or making headlines or winning awards. But the truth is we all do something that is fascinating, that is brave, that is something we should be proud of. Every day people do things that are not celebrated. That is what we should be writing about. The unsung heroes, the people that don't believe they are heroes at all because they are just doing what they believe they have to do in their lives.'
‘Everybody has a story to tell,' she said. ‘That is what links us all...'
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.”
We Should All Be Feminists was first presented as a TED talk given in the United Kingdom at TEDxEuston, in 2012
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.
Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.
The expert detective's pursuit will go unnoticed, but not because he is unremarkable. Rather, like the suspect's shadow, he will appear as though he is meant to be there.
Objects have memory, too. The doorknob remembers who turned it, the telephone who answered it. The gun remembers when it was last fired, and by whom. It is for the detective to learn the language of these things, so that he might hear them when they have something to say.
Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance of one who assumes that a corpse is always around the next corner. That way it is less likely to be your own.
Most everything can be divided into two categories: details and clues. Knowing one from the other is more important than knowing your left shoe from your right.
From I one could really go anywhere at all.
Imagine a desk covered with papers. That is everything you are thinking about. Now imagine a stack of file drawers behind it. That is everything you know. The trick is to keep the desk and the file drawers as close to one another as possible, and the papers stacked neatly.
Only if someone has behaved suspiciously should you allow for the possibility of his innocence.
There is no better way to understand your own motives and dispositions than by finding someone to act as your opposite.
A good detective tries to know everything. But a great detective knows just enough to see him through to the end.
A train will bring you back to the place you came from, but it will not return you home.
The unknown will always be boundless.
What frightens us about the carnival, I think, is not that it will come to town. Or that it will leave town, which it always does. What frightens us is the possibility that it will leave forever, and never come back, and take us with it when it goes.
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
-Langston Hughes
I do not know if these hands will become
Malcolm's—raised and fisted
or Martin's—open and asking
or James's—curled around a pen.
I do not know if these hands will be
Rosa's
or Ruby's
gently gloved
and fiercely folded
calmly in a lap,
on a desk,
around a book,
ready
to change the world . .
You'll face this in your life someday,
my mother will tell us
over and over again.
A moment when you walk into a room and
no one there is like you.
It'll be scary sometimes.
Somewhere in my brain
each laugh, tear and lullaby
becomes memory
We're as good as anybody,
my mother whispers.
As good as anybody
Everyone else, she says,
has a new place to be now.
Everyone else
has gone away.
And now coming back home
isn't really coming back home
at all
Lullaby
At night, every living thing competes
for a chance to be heard.
The crickets
and frogs call out.
Sometimes, there's the soft
who-whoo of an owl lost
amid the pines.
Even the dogs won't rest until
they've howled
at the moon.
But the crickets always win, long after
the frogs stop croaking
and the owl has found its way home.
Long after the dogs have lain down
losing the battle against sleep,
the crickets keep going
as though they know their song
is our lullaby.
Will the words end, I ask
whenever I remember to.
Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now,
and promising me
infinity.
In my own head,
it's real as anything.
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There's nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.
—Langston Hughes
But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.
Even the silence
has a story to tell you.
Just listen. Listen.
And on those days, so much light and warmth fills
the room that it's hard not to believe
in a little bit
of everything.
Do you remember . . . ?
someone's always asking and
someone else, always does.
No accidents, my mother says. Just fate and faith
and reasons.
When there are many worlds
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.
When there are many worlds, love can wrap itself
around you, say, Don't cry. Say, You are as good as anyone.
Say, Keep remembering me. And you know, even as the
world explodes
around you—that you are loved . . .
Each day a new world
opens itself up to you. And all the worlds you are—
Ohio and Greenville
Woodson and Irby
Gunnar's child and Jack's daughter
Jehovah's Witness and nonbeliever
listener and writer
Jackie and Jacqueline—
gather into one world
called You
where You decide
what each world
and each story
and each ending
will finally be.
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.
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
A good story is always more darling than a broken piece of truth.
There is something about words. In expert words, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves round your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
Returning to myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence.
As famous for her secrets as for her stories, she was a perfect mystery.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
I'd expected the world to give up its childlike and familiar appearance to show me its secret, adult side. Instead, cloaked in my new independence, I felt younger than ever.
For me, to see is to read.
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings?
One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people,
I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born... Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.
The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough.
Oh! The outrageous sensation of crumpled paper; words gone wild, flying in all directions, senseless. My heart broke.
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
...when you truly start to care about someone, you become vulnerable to all sorts of things.
In horse racing they put these slats on either side of the horse's head, blocking the creature's peripheral vision. They're called blinders. They don't actually blind the horse, but they allow the horse to see only what's right in front of it; otherwise it might freak out and lose the race.
People live with blinders too; but ours are invisible, and much more sophisticated. Most of the time we don't even know they're there. Maybe we need them, though, because if we took in everything all at once, we'd lose our minds. Or worse, our souls. We'd see, we'd hear, we'd feel so deeply that we might never resurface.
For as long as I can remember I've stolen,
Ripping all the hurts from the people I love,
And from no one else.
I don't choose it,
I don't want it,
But because they found a place in my heart
I steal their pain as soon as I'm near them,
And all because I got caught caring.
But those others,
ALL the others,
Dripping their disapproval like summer sweat,
They're on the outside,
And I will never let them in.
Never.
Let them keep their broken bones,
Shed their own blood,
I hate them.
I have to hate them, don't you see?
Because what if I didn't?
What if I suddenly started to care?
And their friends became my friends,
And every ache and pain,
Every last bit of damage,
Drained from them to me,
Until I was nothing but fractures and sprains,
Cuts and concussions,
But as long as I keep them on the right side of resentment,
Despising them all,
I'm safe.
I rise, battered but not broken.
Never broken.
Because once you stop marveling at that firefly you caught in a jar, it sits on a shelf with no one to let it out
If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together?
Happiness is a vector. It's movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you're moving away from pain.
““Guard your heart,” she told me.
“That is your hero's sword.””
And I believe he could keep his broken leg. It's amazing the things you can hold on to when you're determined to keep them, and the immunity you can develop if you truly want to.
...everyone must feel their own pain—and as awful as that is, it's also wonderful...
I believe what I can see, but now I also believe there is room in the world for miracles. Maybe not the ones we expect, but they're miracles all the same. They happen every day if only we pay attention.
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.