Samiha Tasnim
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
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.”
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.
A death is always exciting, always makes you realise how alive you are, how vulnerable but so-far-lucky; but the death of somebody close gives you a good excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy!
The Sea is a sort of mythological enemy, and I make what you might call sacrifices to it in my soul, fearing it a little, respecting it as you're supposed to, but in many ways treating it as an equal. It does things to the world, and so do I; we should both be feared.
Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.
If we're really so bad and so thick that we'd actually use all those wonderful H-bombs and Neutron bombs on each other, then maybe it's just as well we do wipe ourselves out before we can get into space and start doing horrible things to other races.
All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.
...it can be unsettling to hear yourself described as you have thought of yourself in your most honest and abject moods, just as it is humbling to hear what you have thought about in your most hopeful and unrealistic moments.
I know who I am and I know my limitations. I restrict my horizons for my own good reasons; fear - oh, yes, I admit it - and a need for reassurance and safety in a world which just so happened to treat me very cruelly at an age before I had any real chance of affecting it.
Inside this greater machine, things are not quite so cut and dried (or cut and pickled) as they have appeared in my experience. Each of us, in our own personal Factory, may believe we have stumbled down one corridor, and that our fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum or bizarre, good or bad), but a word, a glance, a slip - anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble hall becomes a gutter, or our rat-maze a golden path. Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey - part chosen, part determined - is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow. I thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact I was still crawling about the face. Now the door closes, and my journey begins.
“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.”
Artemis avoided other teenagers and resented being sent to school, preferring to spend his time plotting his next crime. So even though his involvement with the goblin uprising during his fourteenth year was to be traumatic, terrifying and dangerous, it was probably the best thing that could have happened. At least he spent some time outdoors and got to meet some new people. It's a pity most of them were trying to kill him.
‘We're not giving up, Artemis,' she said softly. ‘We're regrouping. There's a difference. We'll be back. Remember, it's always darkest before the dawn.'
Artemis looked at her. ‘What dawn? We're in the Arctic, remember.'
To remind you that deep beneath the layers of deviousness, there is a spark of decency. Perhaps you could blow on that spark occasionally.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires,
His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.
‘You can't repeat the past.' ‘Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!'
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
... and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Since Maria had decided to die her cat would have to fend for itself.
Enemies of the Party were not merely saboteurs, spies, and wreckers of industry, but doubters of the Party line, doubters of the society which awaited them.
—It's my fault.
—What was your fault?
—My brother's death: I threw a snowball at him. I'd packed it with stones and dirt and grit. Arkady was hurt, it hit him in the head. He ran off. Maybe it made him dizzy, maybe that's why he couldn't see the train. The dirt they found in his mouth: that was my fault. I threw it at him.
—Your brother's death was an accident. There's no reason for you to feel any guilt. But you did well telling me the truth. Now go back to your parents.
—I haven't told them about the snowball with dirt and the mud and the stones.
—Perhaps they don't need to know.
—They'd be so angry. Because that was the last time I ever saw him. Sir, we played nicely most of the time. And we would've played nicely again, we would've made up, we would've been friends again, I'm sure of it. But now I can't make it up to him, I can't ever say sorry.
But having a family had made him fearful. He was able to imagine far worse things than his own death.
...not even those who kept this machinery of fear ticking, could be certain that the system they sustained would not one day swallow them too.
My innocence offends you because you wish me to be guilty. You wish me to be guilty because you've arrested me.
To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.
Leo had the confirmation he was looking for. Major Kuzmin's offer was clear. If he denounced his wife he'd have their continued confidence. What had Vasili said? If you survive this scandal you'll one day berunning the MGB. I'm sure of it. Promotion was a sentence away. The room was silent.
Major Kuzmin leaned forward: —Leo?
Leo stood up, straightened the jacket of his uniform: —My wife is innocent.
They were equals as they had never been equal before. If he wanted to hear about love, the first verse was his to sing.
Did his work have meaning or was it merely a means to survive? There was nothing shameful about trying to survive—it was the occupation of the majority. However, was it enough to live in squalor and not even be rewarded with a sense of pride, not even to be sustained by a sense that what he did served some purpose?
They'd murdered together, deceived together, plotted and planned and lied together. They were criminals, the two of them, them against the world. It was time to consummate this new relationship. If only they could stay here, live here in this exact moment, hidden in the forest, enjoying these feelings forever.
The price of this story was the audience's innocence.
But she refused to accept that she was going to be the one to get them caught just because she wasn't strong enough, refused to accept the idea that they'd fail because she was weak.
Everyone has a reason to live. You were hers. But you were mine too. The only difference between us was that I was sure you were alive.
He'd tried to bury the past. And now his brother had murdered his way back into his life.
There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer, Salander thought.
“The theme of the May issue is the sex trade. The point we have to make is that trafficking is a crime against human rights and that these criminals must be exposed and treated like war criminals or death squads or torturers anywhere in the world. Now let's get going.”
You're an entropic chaos factor.
Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities
A root of an equation is a number which substituted into the equation instead of an unknown converts the equation into an identity. The root is said to satisfy the equation. Solving an equation implies finding all of its roots. An equation that is always satisfied, no matter the choice of values for its unknowns, is called an identity.
There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility.
Salander had a selective morality. She had nothing at all against swindling the company's clients herself—provided they deserved it—but if she had accepted a job with a confidentiality agreement in it, she would never have broken it.
I said that friendship is built on two things—respect and trust. Even if you don't like me, you can still depend on me and trust me. I've never shared your secrets with anyone.
The reference to friendship made her uncomfortable. She didn't know how to respond to it.
“She's one fucking freaky chick . . . but she's one of the good ones. I like her.”
Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.
She may be hard up, but she's a survivor.
“And if she spends the next ten years in prison, at least she was the one who chose that path. I'll still be her friend,” Palmgren said.
“I had no idea you had such a libertarian view of humanity.”
“Neither did I,” he said.
Dreams, Trixie thought, were like soap bubbles. You could look at them from a distance, and they were lovely. It's when you stuck your face too close that your eyes wound up stinging.
When you fooled around without the feelings attached, it might not mean anything ... but then again, neither did you.
And like any accelerant, that would change the equation. Add love, and a person might do something crazy. Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.
Normal's relative.
Even though parents don't want to admit it, school isn't about what a kid absorbs while she's sitting at a cramped desk, but what happens around and in spite of that.
What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?
As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.
She was still afraid, years later - not of the dark but of the days. One after another, and no end in sight.
How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I don't look like me?
All he'd ever been able to do was repaint the world for her, until it became a place she wanted to be.
Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can't become.
Had he forgotten, or had he intended to forget all along?
Who would have imagined that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?
I did not die, and yet I lost life's breath: imagine for yourself what I became, deprived at once of both my life and death.
“Why did you want to leave so badly?”
Her father came up to the sink and wrung out the sponge. “There was nothing there for me.”
“Then you weren't really running away,” Trixie said. “You were running toward.”
... she inched up the wrist of her coat and looked at the loose net of scars. It was her hairline crack, she supposed, and it was only a matter of time before she completely went to pieces.
Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky it bled color?
Maybe it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.
Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to.”
It was easier than you'd think to grow accustomed to silence.
. . . and as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head ... or maybe just your old ones, minus the hope.
She could remember who she used to be - that picture was like an image sealed into a snow globe, one that went fuzzy when she shook it too hard but then, if she held her breath, might see clearly.
Because the more you changed, the less of you there was.
Fastening and tucking seemed so much more intimate than unbuttoning and unzipping, as if you were privy to putting the person back together whole, instead of unraveling him.
A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed
What made a hero a hero? Was it winning all the time, like Superman? Or was it taking on the task reluctantly, like Spider-Man? Was it learning, like the X-Men had, that at any moment you might fall from grace to become a villain? Or, like Alan Moore's Rorschach, was it being human enough to enjoy watching people die, if they deserved it?
“Being a cop isn't all that different from being a father, you know. You do your damnedest, and it's still not good enough to keep the people you care about from hurting themselves.”
Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.
But I am more than a name. More than they tell me. More than the facts and statistics they fill me with.
I lift the corner of my mouth.
Then the other: a smile. Because I know I am supposed to.
Where did those words go, those words that were once in my
head?
Eyes don't breathe. I know that much.
But hers look breathless.
Are the details of our lives who we are, or is it owning those details that
makes the difference?
Maybe that is all any life is composed of, trivia that eventually adds up to a person, and maybe I just don't have enough of it yet to be a whole one.
The dictionary says my identity should be all about being separate or distinct, and yet it feels like it is so wrapped up in others.
I'm afraid that for the rest of my two or two hundred years I will still have all these questions and I will never fit in.
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.
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.
All I could do was talk, but no one on Earth could hear me.
In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.
The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
“Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time,” he said. “If they want to be found, that is.” It was cryptic, sort of a Confucius-says answer, but it worked on almost every civilian.
Odd girls who had found each other in the strangest way—in the shiver she had felt when I passed.
This is just a temporary hell, not a permanent one.
“When the dead are done with the living,” Franny said to me, “the living can go on to other things.”
Late at night the air above hospitals and senior citizen homes was often thick and fast with souls.
When Buckley stood on the iron chair—“Now scoot up my back,” my father said, stooping forward, “and grab on to my shoulders,” not knowing if he'd have the strength to lift him up from there—I crossed my fingers hard in heaven and held my breath. In the cornfield, yes, but, in this moment, repairing the most basic fabric of their previous day-to-day lives, challenging his injury to take a moment like this back, my father became my hero.
Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
...small forgotten moments with Buckley, the accidents of love that happened with his son.
I felt, if I were to say any word, churned. Not as a verb but as an adjective. Happy + Frightened = Churned.
I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light... still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.
In some way I could not account for—had they reached a state of bliss? were my parents back together forever? had Buckley begun to tell someone his troubles? would my father's heart truly heal?—I was done yearning for them, needing them to yearn for me. Though I still would. Though they still would. Always.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
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.
If we make it through this, we will be friends. Bonded by trauma.
“Well?” said Holly, her face inches from his own. “We survived. Does that mean we're friends now? Bonded by trauma.”
Artemis frowned. Friends? Did he have room in his life for a friend? Then again, did he have a choice in the matter?
“Yes,” he replied. “I've had little experience in this area, so I may have to read up on it.”
Holly rolled her eyes. “Friendship is not a science, Mud Boy. Forget about your massive brain for one minute. Just do what you feel is right.”
I have friends? thought Artemis Fowl the Second. I have friends.
It seemed as though good was a more powerful motivation than bad. Who would have thought it?
Seven and a half hours to save the world. Isn't there some law that says we get at least twenty-four?
“... By the time anyone gets here, we'll either be heroes or outlaws.”
“We're already outlaws,” said Artemis.
“True,” agreed Holly. “But soon we could be outlaws with no one chasing us.”
We can only change the future, not the past or present. If I go back, then I have already been back.'
Murder was just another service that could be purchased.
When you decide to die, Artemis thought sluggishly, it doesn't matter how many people want to kill you.
That's wonderful. Opal Koboi. I knew this little trip was missing a psychotic element.
‘I bet,' said Mulch. ‘That you would set the world on fire, just to watch it burn.'
No, he decided. There were still people who deserved to be stolen from, or exposed, or dropped in deep jungle with only flip-flops and a spoon. He would just have to put more effort into finding them.
Artemis gazed up at his friend through a red haze.
‘I'm sorry I lied to you, Holly. Truly. You've done so much.'
Holly's eyes were distant.
‘Maybe you made the wrong decision; maybe I would have made that decision myself. We're from different worlds, Artemis. We will always have doubts about each other. Let's just carry on and leave the past in the past, where it should be.'
It's the big time paradox. If I had done nothing, then nothing would have needed to be done.
‘You know something, Fowl? You did a good thing here. For its own sake. Not one penny of profit.'
Artemis grimaced. ‘I know. I'm appalled.'
Angeline held him at arm's length. ‘I was in the diseased hell of that pixie's brain, Artemis. Don't you dare lie to me and say that I wasn't. I saw your friends almost die to help you. I saw Butler's heart stop. I saw you save us all. Look me in the eye and tell me these things did not happen.'