Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they've cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt in your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.
I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a math problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.
“This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.”
― Jodi Picoult, Mercy
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
― C.S. Lewis
“This is the secret that none dares tell who fights for a cause. Dying, we are all alike.”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
"Sometimes people fall in love with those who do not return the same strengths of feelings. It is as it is," he said with a quiet intensity. "What I give, I give freely. You owe me nothing, not love, not friendship, not even obligation."
“I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“It's so hard to express yourself.'
I understand this.'
I want to express myself.'
The same is true for me.'
I'm looking for my voice.'
It's in your mouth.'
I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.'
Something you are proud of, yes?'
Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.” ― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
“So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
I wonder that all the time-- what will happen next. Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now, and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or...or what?
It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes I wonder if my whole life will pass by this way: me waiting in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone else to make it happen. Something new or different or crazy and amazing. I've been here for so long, letting everyone else figure it out for me, floating along without much direction or conscious thought. Reacting.
“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, or tarnishing.
“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“People know your tragedies and they treat you like you’re not human. Like you’re a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain. You see how they look at me? They’re stuck on that person I used to be. They can’t see that old life as just a moment in time that I’ve moved on from. It was a horrible life.” ― Eric Jerome Dickey
“It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?" -Gilbert K. Chesterton
“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.
“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
That's one of the damnedest things I ever found out about human emotions and how treacherous they can be-- the fact that you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. Not to speak of the fact that you can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.
I'm sick and tired of being on my own. Most of the time I'm fine. Some of the time I even quite enjoy it. But at this precise moment in time I'm fed up with it. I've had enough.
Nothing in this world happens without a reason. That we are all exactly where we are supposed to be, and that the pieces of the puzzle have a tendency to come together when you least expect it.
There is always someone judging you, no matter how good a person you are. Hell you could be a saint, and still there would be that one person who'll despise you.
Most people think the scariest thing is knowing that you're going to die. It's not. It's knowing you might have to watch every single person you've ever loved--or even liked-- waste away while you just stand there.
You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding with the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.
There will always be a reason why you meet people. Either you need them to change your life or you're the one that will change theirs.
I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
I just feel trapped. I don't really know what I'm being trapped by though. I just feel this heavy weight on my chest. Like I can't move and every breath gets harder to take. Like a skyscraper collapsed and I was expected to catch it singlehandedly. I feel buried alive by burdens, both my burdens and others. I cannot rid myself of these overwhelming feelings of claustrophobia. Save me from this weight, it's crushing me slowly.
I've formed a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression, and self-loathing.
We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces. ( Choke by Chuck Palahniuk )
“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it." ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. ( Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov )
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does. ( The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood )
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. ( Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood )
This was the wonderful thing about strangers. They were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw whatever you like on their impressionable surfaces. ( Paint It Black by Janet Fitch )
“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
“The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.”
― Stevie Smith, Collected Poems
My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realize no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad. ( On the Road by Jack Kerouac )
Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us. ( One by Richard Bach )
Change isn't easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That's hard. ( One Door Away from Heaven by Dean Koontz )
“Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.”
― J.K. Rowling
All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. ( One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey )
“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
But most days,
I wander around feeling invisible.
Like I'm a speck of dust
floating in the air
that can only be seen
when a shaft of light hits it.
( One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones )
"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. ( The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin )
I would give anything to escape myself, Flynn thought, just for a day, just for a minute even. Just to know what it was like to think differently, to feel differently, and to not be me. (A Note of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma )
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."- Gilbert K. Chesterton
“So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
I realize the odds, and science, are against me. But science is not the total answer; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things. ( The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks )
To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.
( Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky )
When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence. ( Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller )
“He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.” ― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
“That's the thing about pain...it demands to be felt.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
We don't have to be defined by the things we did or didn't do in our past. Some people allow themselves to be controlled by regret. Maybe it's a regret, maybe it's not. It's merely something that happened. Get over it. ( I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore )
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralysed, their options appear sparse or non-existent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. 'This is my last experiment,' wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. 'If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I'll have to be shown.' ( Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison )
So she guessed you could work hard to make yourself who you wanted to be and yet find that the passing years had transformed you beyond your own recognition. End up disappointed in yourself, despite your best efforts. ( Nightwoods by Charles Frazier )
By the same token, what made you happy once, might not make you happy now.
( Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult )
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
( No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy )
"Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets." -Rudyard Kipling
Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone. ( No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July )
“Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by happiness that is not your own.”
― L.M. Montgomery
I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you. ( A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly )
“You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. ( Mort by Terry Pratchett )
Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it. ( Nick Flynn )
“Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath
You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. The 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.
( The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern )
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” ― John Green
Most times we only see things for the way we are. But we're good at lying to ourselves. Sometimes we need somebody who's not living in our skin to pint out how things really are. ( The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint )
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the mind of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. ( The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss )
Just because a person is beautiful doesn't mean there's no soul beneath. Doesn't mean that person hasn't suffered like everyone else, doesn't mean they don't hope to still be a good human being in an awful world.
( Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan )
You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world? It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It's all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it's even possible to find out. It's all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It's all the wasted chances. ( Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett )
You don't know who or what you're praying to, but you pray. You don't even regret the life that you're not gonna have, because by then you'll be dead. And the dead don't feel anything. Not even regret. ( My Life Without Me )
There were times when an apology was best, she thought, even when one really had nothing to apologise for. If only people would say sorry sooner rather than later, much discord and unhappiness could be avoided. But that was not the way people were. So often pride stood in the way of apology, and then, when somebody was ready to say sorry, it was already too late.
( The Miracle at Speedy Motors by Alexander McCall Smith )
And doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that hit too close to home? Doesn't that make you shiver, the way things could have gone? And doesn't it feel peculiar that everyone wants a little more? So that I do remember to never go that far could you leave me with a scar?
( Scar | Missy Higgins )
"The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do." -John Ruskin
For six days I didn't get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn't usually announce itself. No. What happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me. ( Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones )
There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. ( Mistral's Kiss by Laurell K. Hamilton )
“Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.”
― Shan Sa, Empress
"Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we’re an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we’re still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we’re all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again—each of us playing our parts in the other’s plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.”
― Libba Bray
When the world you're used to, that same old world you thought you knew so well, turns itself suddenly upside down, what can you do? Everything comes tumbling off the shelves of your expectations; nothing fits anymore. ( The Moon Over High Street by Natalie Babbitt )
I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen and done, of everything done to me. I am everyone, everything whose being in the world was affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come. ( Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie )
I finally figured out that I'm solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won't go away. It doesn't matter where I am, or how alone - I always have such a crowded head. ( Charles de Lint )
People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them anymore. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had. ( Michael Ende )
It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if i's too late to find out.
( Microserfs by Douglas Coupland )
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death.
( Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill )
“I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are okay, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute. ( A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby )
I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.
( Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse )
He thinks I suffer from depression. But I'm just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves. ( Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy )
Just because people treat you like shit, just because you may feel like shit sometimes, doesn't mean you are shit. You can make something of your life. You can give of yourself in this world to make it a better place. ( Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger )
I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived. ( Little Bee by Chris Cleave )
Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the rules of thought, feeling, and behaviour in these circumstances/ It seems like there should be a rule book somewhere that lays out everything exactly the way one should respond to a loss like this. I'd surely like to know if I'm doing it right. Am I whining enough or too much? Am I unseemly in my occasional moments of light-heartedness? At what date am I supposed to turn off the emotion and jump back on the treadmill of normalcy? Is there a specific number of days or decades that must pass before I can do something I enjoy without feeling I've betrayed my dearest love? And when, oh when, am I ever going to believe this has happened? Next time you're in a bookstore, ask if there's a rule book. ( Life's That Way by Jim Beaver )
“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska
What she wanted was really two things: to be elsewhere, and to be somebody else. Or at least a version of herself that had made better decisions, that had thought more clearly.
( The Light of Falling Stars by J. Robert Lennon )
One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others. ( Lightning by Dean Koontz )
I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyze the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.
You're proud of. If you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. --F. Scott Fitzgerald
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.
Pain doesn't tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice
in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you
continue, you will change. Don't let it stop you from being who you can be.
Exhaustion tells you when you ought to stop.
You only reach your limit when you can go no further.
Don't be someone's downtime, spare time, part time or sometime. If they can't be there for you all of the time, then they're not even worth your time.
You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.
– Maya Angelou
I got room for you but not a lot of pity. You did what you did and it's done. Take it or leave it.
( One Tree Hill )
Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault.
( The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta )
You can be the ripest juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be
somebody who hates peaches. -Dita Von Ceese
“she was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.”
- Neil Gaiman
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be. ( Leo Tolstoy )
“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. ( Life After God by Douglas Coupland )
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always, so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself up to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. ( Life of Pi by Yann Martel )
When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening. ( The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto )
Don't let anyone tell you that the truth can't disappear. If I believe in anything, rather than God, is that I am part of something that goes all the way back to Antigone, and that whatever speaks the truth of our hearts can only make us stronger. Can only give us the power to counter the hate and bigotry and heal this addled world.
Just remember: You are not alone. ( Last Watch of the Night by Paul Monette )
There comes a point when you either embrace who and what you are, or condemn yourself to be miserable all your days. Other people will try to make you miserable; don't help them by doing the job yourself. ( A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton )
Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed 'yrs forever' until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had as some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneat his ribcage.
It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd gotten. And he'd gotten plenty.
( An Abundance of Katherines by John Green )
The truth about life was that nothing ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
( Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby )
Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they're not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse. ( Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton )
How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes. ( The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen )
Build a ship before you burn a bridge.
Expectation is the root of all heartache. –William Shakespeare
2 am is for the poets who can’t sleep because their minds are alive with words for someone who’s not there.
Sometimes at night I suddenly become aware of all the things I’m missing out on right now, and all the people I’m not close to anymore, and of all the good times that will never happen again, and all the people who meant the world to me who have forgotten about me forever, and I get this awful feeling that’s kind of like a mix between loneliness and nostalgia.
People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
― Brené Brown
There is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.
Because sometimes there is no easy way out. You just have to grin and bear it. Sometimes the only escape route is to go straight through the flames, just brace yourself and bite your lip. Sometimes you have to sever the ties clean off. Because in every relationship there comes a point when the damage is too much and no matter how good it once was, the memories can't sustain you. You have to save yourself knowing all the while it will hurt like hell. Because you can't keep giving someone everything if you get nothing in return.
All I can do is be me, whoever that is. All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die. This world is ruled by violence. No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky. Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.
You need to see that life is not always perfect. We will not always get what we want. And though it hurts a lot, what should've happened, happened. Who should've left, left, and whatever has thrown you off course will always bring you to where it is you need to be.
Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn't feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of... what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That's my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me and makes one hell of a story.
When your family calls, you make nice to them all, and assure them you're fine and you're great. Then you cry and take a bath, cry so hard till you laugh. Then you watch television till late. Who do you need? Nobody.
“Ester asked why people are sad.
"That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
People think they know you. They think they know how you're handling a situation. But the truth is, no one knows. No one knows what happens after you leave them, when you're lying in bed or sitting over your breakfast alone and all you want to do is cry or scream. They don't know what's going on inside your head - the mind-numbing cocktail of anger and sadness and guilt. This isn't their fault. They just don't know. And so they pretend and they say you're doing great when you're really not. And this makes everyone feel better. Everybody but you.
A wise man sat in the audience and cracked a joke. Everybody laughed like crazy. After a moment, he cracked the same joke again, less people laughed this time. He cracked the same joke again and again. When there is no laughter in the crowd, he smiled and said, ” You can’t laugh on the same joke again and again, then why do you keep crying on the same thing over and over again?"
Sometimes when you're young you think nothing can hurt you. It's like being invincible. Your whole life is ahead of you and you have big plans. Big plans. Find your perfect match, the one that completes you. But as you get older you realize it's not always that easy. It's not until the end of your life that you realize that the plans you made were simply plans. Because at the end when you're looking back instead of forward, you want to believe that you made the most of what life gave you. You want to believe that you are leaving something good behind. You want it all to have mattered.
“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
It takes strength to be firm, it takes courage to be gentle. It takes strength to conquer, it takes courage to surrender. It takes strength to be certain, it takes courage to have doubt. It takes strength to fit in, it takes courage to stand out. It takes strength to feel a friend’s pain, it takes courage to feel your own pain. It takes strength to endure abuse, it takes courage to stop it. It takes strength to stand alone, it takes courage to lean on another. It takes strength to love, it takes courage to be loved. It takes strength to survive, it takes courage to live.
Listen. There are times when life calls out for a change. A transition. Like the seasons. Our spring was wonderful, but summer is over now and we missed out on autumn. And now all of a sudden, it’s cold, so cold that everything is freezing over. Our love fell asleep, and the snow took it by surprise. But if you fall asleep in the snow, you don’t feel death coming.
‘What caused you this pain in your heart?’, she asked. “My eyes. I had them closed for so long and when I finally opened them, I wasn’t ready for what they saw.” He replied.
Usually when I was alone in the house during the evening, I had to turn on every single light, but I didn't care that night. So what if a hand came out from under the bed and grabbed me? That would be nothing. They say that certain things are going to be terrible and that they are going to destroy you, but they don't. I sat on the side of the bed. It was as if my soul had been frozen, and I waited for it to thaw, in order to get on with my life.
Whenever you leave something you loved so much that meant the entire world to you, there comes a long process in reaction to it. You're thrusted into something that feels like somewhere you've never been before. But it's the exact same place you've been in. Sometimes your heart needs a long restart to realize how it feels to be off your sleeve, and back in your own chest.
“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry
Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.
I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me. All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this plane.
After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul. And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning, and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses are not contracts, and present's aren’t promises. And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes ahead with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child. And you learn to build all your roads on today, cause tomorrows ground is too uncertain for plans, and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After awhile you learn even sunshine burns if you get too much. So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn you really can endure, you really are strong, you really do have worth. And you learn, and you learn. With every goodbye, you learn.
Mother nature is a manic depressive and father time is a dead beat dad with excessive drinking problems. Now he's lost and swerve and talk and slur and slipping on the earth's frosting surface. But I'm walking perfectly. Shit, those are like the two perfect words for me. But if I'm a waste that you never felt, then I'ma hang your vivid dreams with my leather belt.
“Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.” ― Douglas Coupland, Life After God
“Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.” ― Douglas Coupland, JPod
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to - like talking to dogs. ” ― Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
“My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.
And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.” ― Douglas Coupland, Life After God
“...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. ” ― Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic
I like drinking coffee alone and reading alone. I like riding the bus alone and walking home alone. It gives me time to think and set my mind free. I like eating alone and listening to music alone. But when I see a mother with her child, a girl with her lover, or a friend laughing with their best friend, I realize that even though I like being alone, I don’t fancy being lonely. The sky is beautiful, but the people are sad. I just need someone who won’t run away.
“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I don't like hope very much. In fact, I hate it. It's the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard. It's bad news. The worst. It's sharp sticks and cherry bombs. When hope shows up, it's only a matter of time until someone gets hurt.” ― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime And Punishment
“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.”― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
“You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening... ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“One day can change your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is three or four big days that change everything.” ― Beverly Donofrio
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But how could you live and have no story to tell?” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.” ― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
“Shame isn't a quiet grey cloud, shame is a drowning man who claws his way on top of you, scratching and tearing your skin, pushing you under the surface.”
― Kirsty Eagar, Raw Blue
“Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.” ― Charles de Lint, Moonheart
“[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.”― Charles de Lint
“Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.” ― Charles de Lint
“Think... of the world you carry within you.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.” ― Charles de Lint
“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.” ― Charles de Lint
“Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.” ― Charles de Lint, The Blue Girl
“It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.” ― Charles de Lint
“There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.” ― Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
“Look inside yourself for the answers - you're the only one who knows what's best for you. Everybody else is only guessing.”
― Charles de Lint, Trader
“I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them--as many as there are people--because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.”
― Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“I love this world," he added. "That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can, but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands.” ― Charles de Lint, The Little Country
“Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile—reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength—to the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.” ― Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye
“From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.” ― Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas
“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.” ― Dean Koontz
“No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.” ― Dean Koontz, A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
“If we were always conscious of the fact that people precious to us are frighteningly mortal, hanging not even by a thread, but by a wisp of gossamer, perhaps we would be kinder to them and more grateful for the love and friendship they give to us.” ― Dean Koontz, Seize the Night
“Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.” ― Dean Koontz, Your Heart Belongs to Me
“This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.” ― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd
“Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities.” ― Dean Koontz, Midnight
“If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a supporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.” ― Dean Koontz, Life Expectancy
“Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself. ― Nick Flynn
“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action;
and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and I want my grasp of things to be
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
"“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father's domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
Are those real islands?' asked the young prince.
Of course they are real islands,' said the man in evening dress.
And those strange and troubling creatures?'
They are all genuine and authentic princesses.'
Then God must exist!' cried the prince.
I am God,' replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow.
The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.
So you are back,' said the father, the king.
I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
Neither real islands, nor real princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.'
I saw them!'
Tell me how God was dressed.'
God was in full evening dress.'
Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?'
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.
That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.'
At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
My father the king has told me who you are,' said the young prince indignantly. 'You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.'
The man on the shore smiled.
It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father's kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father's spell, so you cannot see them.'
The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.
Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?'
The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves.
Yes, my son, I am only a magician.'
Then the man on the shore was God.'
The man on the shore was another magician.'
I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.'
There is no truth beyond magic,' said the king.
The prince was full of sadness.
He said, 'I will kill myself.'
The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.
Very well,' he said. 'I can bear it.'
You see, my son,' said the king, 'you too now begin to be a magician.”
― John Fowles
I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a math problem when your brain's exhausted, and you know there's some far-off solution, but you can't work up the energy even to give it a go. Something in me just gave up.
“This was something she would keep hidden within herself, maybe in place of the knot of pain and anger she had been carrying under her breastbone...a security blanket, an ace up her sleeve. She might never use it, but she would always feel its presence like a swelling secret stone, and that way when she let go of the rage, she would not feel nearly as empty.”
― Jodi Picoult, Mercy
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
― C.S. Lewis
“This is the secret that none dares tell who fights for a cause. Dying, we are all alike.”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart
“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
"Sometimes people fall in love with those who do not return the same strengths of feelings. It is as it is," he said with a quiet intensity. "What I give, I give freely. You owe me nothing, not love, not friendship, not even obligation."
“I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“It's so hard to express yourself.'
I understand this.'
I want to express myself.'
The same is true for me.'
I'm looking for my voice.'
It's in your mouth.'
I want to do something I'm not ashamed of.'
Something you are proud of, yes?'
Not even. I just don't want to be ashamed.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
“Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.” ― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1
“So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
I wonder that all the time-- what will happen next. Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now, and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or...or what?
It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes I wonder if my whole life will pass by this way: me waiting in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone else to make it happen. Something new or different or crazy and amazing. I've been here for so long, letting everyone else figure it out for me, floating along without much direction or conscious thought. Reacting.
“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, or tarnishing.
“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“People know your tragedies and they treat you like you’re not human. Like you’re a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain. You see how they look at me? They’re stuck on that person I used to be. They can’t see that old life as just a moment in time that I’ve moved on from. It was a horrible life.” ― Eric Jerome Dickey
“It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
"When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?" -Gilbert K. Chesterton
“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.
“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
That's one of the damnedest things I ever found out about human emotions and how treacherous they can be-- the fact that you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it. Not to speak of the fact that you can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.
I'm sick and tired of being on my own. Most of the time I'm fine. Some of the time I even quite enjoy it. But at this precise moment in time I'm fed up with it. I've had enough.
Nothing in this world happens without a reason. That we are all exactly where we are supposed to be, and that the pieces of the puzzle have a tendency to come together when you least expect it.
There is always someone judging you, no matter how good a person you are. Hell you could be a saint, and still there would be that one person who'll despise you.
Most people think the scariest thing is knowing that you're going to die. It's not. It's knowing you might have to watch every single person you've ever loved--or even liked-- waste away while you just stand there.
You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding with the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.
There will always be a reason why you meet people. Either you need them to change your life or you're the one that will change theirs.
I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
I just feel trapped. I don't really know what I'm being trapped by though. I just feel this heavy weight on my chest. Like I can't move and every breath gets harder to take. Like a skyscraper collapsed and I was expected to catch it singlehandedly. I feel buried alive by burdens, both my burdens and others. I cannot rid myself of these overwhelming feelings of claustrophobia. Save me from this weight, it's crushing me slowly.
I've formed a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression, and self-loathing.
We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces. ( Choke by Chuck Palahniuk )
“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it." ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
There never can be a man so lost as one who is lost in the vast and intricate corridors of his own lonely mind, where none may reach and none may save. ( Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov )
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does. ( The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood )
If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice. ( Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood )
This was the wonderful thing about strangers. They were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw whatever you like on their impressionable surfaces. ( Paint It Black by Janet Fitch )
“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
“The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.”
― Stevie Smith, Collected Poems
My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realize no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad. ( On the Road by Jack Kerouac )
Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us. ( One by Richard Bach )
Change isn't easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That's hard. ( One Door Away from Heaven by Dean Koontz )
“Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.”
― J.K. Rowling
All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. ( One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey )
“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
But most days,
I wander around feeling invisible.
Like I'm a speck of dust
floating in the air
that can only be seen
when a shaft of light hits it.
( One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones )
"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless."
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. ( The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin )
I would give anything to escape myself, Flynn thought, just for a day, just for a minute even. Just to know what it was like to think differently, to feel differently, and to not be me. (A Note of Madness by Tabitha Suzuma )
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."- Gilbert K. Chesterton
“So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
I realize the odds, and science, are against me. But science is not the total answer; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things. ( The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks )
To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.
( Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky )
When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence. ( Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller )
“He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led to nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.” ― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
“That's the thing about pain...it demands to be felt.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
We don't have to be defined by the things we did or didn't do in our past. Some people allow themselves to be controlled by regret. Maybe it's a regret, maybe it's not. It's merely something that happened. Get over it. ( I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore )
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralysed, their options appear sparse or non-existent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. 'This is my last experiment,' wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. 'If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I'll have to be shown.' ( Night Falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison )
So she guessed you could work hard to make yourself who you wanted to be and yet find that the passing years had transformed you beyond your own recognition. End up disappointed in yourself, despite your best efforts. ( Nightwoods by Charles Frazier )
By the same token, what made you happy once, might not make you happy now.
( Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult )
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
( No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy )
"Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets." -Rudyard Kipling
Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone. ( No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July )
“Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by happiness that is not your own.”
― L.M. Montgomery
I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you. ( A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly )
“You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. ( Mort by Terry Pratchett )
Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it. ( Nick Flynn )
“Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkdeath
You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. The 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.
( The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern )
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” ― John Green
Most times we only see things for the way we are. But we're good at lying to ourselves. Sometimes we need somebody who's not living in our skin to pint out how things really are. ( The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint )
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the mind of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. ( The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss )
Just because a person is beautiful doesn't mean there's no soul beneath. Doesn't mean that person hasn't suffered like everyone else, doesn't mean they don't hope to still be a good human being in an awful world.
( Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan )
You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world? It's all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they're really good at. It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It's all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it's even possible to find out. It's all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be. It's all the wasted chances. ( Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett )
You don't know who or what you're praying to, but you pray. You don't even regret the life that you're not gonna have, because by then you'll be dead. And the dead don't feel anything. Not even regret. ( My Life Without Me )
There were times when an apology was best, she thought, even when one really had nothing to apologise for. If only people would say sorry sooner rather than later, much discord and unhappiness could be avoided. But that was not the way people were. So often pride stood in the way of apology, and then, when somebody was ready to say sorry, it was already too late.
( The Miracle at Speedy Motors by Alexander McCall Smith )
And doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that hit too close to home? Doesn't that make you shiver, the way things could have gone? And doesn't it feel peculiar that everyone wants a little more? So that I do remember to never go that far could you leave me with a scar?
( Scar | Missy Higgins )
"The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do." -John Ruskin
For six days I didn't get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn't usually announce itself. No. What happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me. ( Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones )
There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. ( Mistral's Kiss by Laurell K. Hamilton )
“Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.”
― Shan Sa, Empress
"Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we’re an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we’re still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we’re all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again—each of us playing our parts in the other’s plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.”
― Libba Bray
When the world you're used to, that same old world you thought you knew so well, turns itself suddenly upside down, what can you do? Everything comes tumbling off the shelves of your expectations; nothing fits anymore. ( The Moon Over High Street by Natalie Babbitt )
I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen and done, of everything done to me. I am everyone, everything whose being in the world was affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come. ( Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie )
I finally figured out that I'm solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won't go away. It doesn't matter where I am, or how alone - I always have such a crowded head. ( Charles de Lint )
People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker, and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them anymore. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had. ( Michael Ende )
It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if i's too late to find out.
( Microserfs by Douglas Coupland )
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death.
( Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill )
“I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are okay, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute. ( A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby )
I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.
( Love Among the Chickens by P.G. Wodehouse )
He thinks I suffer from depression. But I'm just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves. ( Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy )
Just because people treat you like shit, just because you may feel like shit sometimes, doesn't mean you are shit. You can make something of your life. You can give of yourself in this world to make it a better place. ( Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger )
I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived. ( Little Bee by Chris Cleave )
Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the rules of thought, feeling, and behaviour in these circumstances/ It seems like there should be a rule book somewhere that lays out everything exactly the way one should respond to a loss like this. I'd surely like to know if I'm doing it right. Am I whining enough or too much? Am I unseemly in my occasional moments of light-heartedness? At what date am I supposed to turn off the emotion and jump back on the treadmill of normalcy? Is there a specific number of days or decades that must pass before I can do something I enjoy without feeling I've betrayed my dearest love? And when, oh when, am I ever going to believe this has happened? Next time you're in a bookstore, ask if there's a rule book. ( Life's That Way by Jim Beaver )
“What is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska
What she wanted was really two things: to be elsewhere, and to be somebody else. Or at least a version of herself that had made better decisions, that had thought more clearly.
( The Light of Falling Stars by J. Robert Lennon )
One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others. ( Lightning by Dean Koontz )
I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyze the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.
You're proud of. If you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. --F. Scott Fitzgerald
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.
Pain doesn't tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice
in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you
continue, you will change. Don't let it stop you from being who you can be.
Exhaustion tells you when you ought to stop.
You only reach your limit when you can go no further.
Don't be someone's downtime, spare time, part time or sometime. If they can't be there for you all of the time, then they're not even worth your time.
You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.
– Maya Angelou
I got room for you but not a lot of pity. You did what you did and it's done. Take it or leave it.
( One Tree Hill )
Jill felt an emptiness open inside of her as she lifted her arm, a sense that something vital was being subtracted from her life. It was always like that when somebody you cared about went away, even when you knew it was inevitable, and it probably wasn't your fault.
( The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta )
You can be the ripest juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be
somebody who hates peaches. -Dita Von Ceese
“she was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.”
- Neil Gaiman
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be. ( Leo Tolstoy )
“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. ( Life After God by Douglas Coupland )
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always, so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself up to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. ( Life of Pi by Yann Martel )
When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening. ( The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto )
Don't let anyone tell you that the truth can't disappear. If I believe in anything, rather than God, is that I am part of something that goes all the way back to Antigone, and that whatever speaks the truth of our hearts can only make us stronger. Can only give us the power to counter the hate and bigotry and heal this addled world.
Just remember: You are not alone. ( Last Watch of the Night by Paul Monette )
There comes a point when you either embrace who and what you are, or condemn yourself to be miserable all your days. Other people will try to make you miserable; don't help them by doing the job yourself. ( A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton )
Eventually, he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. He anagrammed 'yrs forever' until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus. Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had as some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneat his ribcage.
It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd gotten. And he'd gotten plenty.
( An Abundance of Katherines by John Green )
The truth about life was that nothing ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
( Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby )
Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they're not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse. ( Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton )
How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes. ( The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen )
Build a ship before you burn a bridge.
Expectation is the root of all heartache. –William Shakespeare
2 am is for the poets who can’t sleep because their minds are alive with words for someone who’s not there.
Sometimes at night I suddenly become aware of all the things I’m missing out on right now, and all the people I’m not close to anymore, and of all the good times that will never happen again, and all the people who meant the world to me who have forgotten about me forever, and I get this awful feeling that’s kind of like a mix between loneliness and nostalgia.
People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”
― Brené Brown
There is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.
Because sometimes there is no easy way out. You just have to grin and bear it. Sometimes the only escape route is to go straight through the flames, just brace yourself and bite your lip. Sometimes you have to sever the ties clean off. Because in every relationship there comes a point when the damage is too much and no matter how good it once was, the memories can't sustain you. You have to save yourself knowing all the while it will hurt like hell. Because you can't keep giving someone everything if you get nothing in return.
All I can do is be me, whoever that is. All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die. This world is ruled by violence. No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky. Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be.
You need to see that life is not always perfect. We will not always get what we want. And though it hurts a lot, what should've happened, happened. Who should've left, left, and whatever has thrown you off course will always bring you to where it is you need to be.
Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn't feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of... what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That's my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me and makes one hell of a story.
When your family calls, you make nice to them all, and assure them you're fine and you're great. Then you cry and take a bath, cry so hard till you laugh. Then you watch television till late. Who do you need? Nobody.
“Ester asked why people are sad.
"That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
People think they know you. They think they know how you're handling a situation. But the truth is, no one knows. No one knows what happens after you leave them, when you're lying in bed or sitting over your breakfast alone and all you want to do is cry or scream. They don't know what's going on inside your head - the mind-numbing cocktail of anger and sadness and guilt. This isn't their fault. They just don't know. And so they pretend and they say you're doing great when you're really not. And this makes everyone feel better. Everybody but you.
A wise man sat in the audience and cracked a joke. Everybody laughed like crazy. After a moment, he cracked the same joke again, less people laughed this time. He cracked the same joke again and again. When there is no laughter in the crowd, he smiled and said, ” You can’t laugh on the same joke again and again, then why do you keep crying on the same thing over and over again?"
Sometimes when you're young you think nothing can hurt you. It's like being invincible. Your whole life is ahead of you and you have big plans. Big plans. Find your perfect match, the one that completes you. But as you get older you realize it's not always that easy. It's not until the end of your life that you realize that the plans you made were simply plans. Because at the end when you're looking back instead of forward, you want to believe that you made the most of what life gave you. You want to believe that you are leaving something good behind. You want it all to have mattered.
“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
It takes strength to be firm, it takes courage to be gentle. It takes strength to conquer, it takes courage to surrender. It takes strength to be certain, it takes courage to have doubt. It takes strength to fit in, it takes courage to stand out. It takes strength to feel a friend’s pain, it takes courage to feel your own pain. It takes strength to endure abuse, it takes courage to stop it. It takes strength to stand alone, it takes courage to lean on another. It takes strength to love, it takes courage to be loved. It takes strength to survive, it takes courage to live.
Listen. There are times when life calls out for a change. A transition. Like the seasons. Our spring was wonderful, but summer is over now and we missed out on autumn. And now all of a sudden, it’s cold, so cold that everything is freezing over. Our love fell asleep, and the snow took it by surprise. But if you fall asleep in the snow, you don’t feel death coming.
‘What caused you this pain in your heart?’, she asked. “My eyes. I had them closed for so long and when I finally opened them, I wasn’t ready for what they saw.” He replied.
Usually when I was alone in the house during the evening, I had to turn on every single light, but I didn't care that night. So what if a hand came out from under the bed and grabbed me? That would be nothing. They say that certain things are going to be terrible and that they are going to destroy you, but they don't. I sat on the side of the bed. It was as if my soul had been frozen, and I waited for it to thaw, in order to get on with my life.
Whenever you leave something you loved so much that meant the entire world to you, there comes a long process in reaction to it. You're thrusted into something that feels like somewhere you've never been before. But it's the exact same place you've been in. Sometimes your heart needs a long restart to realize how it feels to be off your sleeve, and back in your own chest.
“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry
Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.
I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me. All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this plane.
After a while you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul. And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning, and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn that kisses are not contracts, and present's aren’t promises. And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes ahead with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child. And you learn to build all your roads on today, cause tomorrows ground is too uncertain for plans, and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After awhile you learn even sunshine burns if you get too much. So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn you really can endure, you really are strong, you really do have worth. And you learn, and you learn. With every goodbye, you learn.
Mother nature is a manic depressive and father time is a dead beat dad with excessive drinking problems. Now he's lost and swerve and talk and slur and slipping on the earth's frosting surface. But I'm walking perfectly. Shit, those are like the two perfect words for me. But if I'm a waste that you never felt, then I'ma hang your vivid dreams with my leather belt.
“Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.” ― Douglas Coupland, Life After God
“Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.” ― Douglas Coupland, JPod
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to - like talking to dogs. ” ― Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief
“My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.
And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.” ― Douglas Coupland, Life After God
“...blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos. ” ― Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic
I like drinking coffee alone and reading alone. I like riding the bus alone and walking home alone. It gives me time to think and set my mind free. I like eating alone and listening to music alone. But when I see a mother with her child, a girl with her lover, or a friend laughing with their best friend, I realize that even though I like being alone, I don’t fancy being lonely. The sky is beautiful, but the people are sad. I just need someone who won’t run away.
“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I don't like hope very much. In fact, I hate it. It's the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard. It's bad news. The worst. It's sharp sticks and cherry bombs. When hope shows up, it's only a matter of time until someone gets hurt.” ― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime And Punishment
“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.”― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
“You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening... ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“One day can change your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is three or four big days that change everything.” ― Beverly Donofrio
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“But how could you live and have no story to tell?” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies.” ― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
“Shame isn't a quiet grey cloud, shame is a drowning man who claws his way on top of you, scratching and tearing your skin, pushing you under the surface.”
― Kirsty Eagar, Raw Blue
“Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors.” ― Charles de Lint, Moonheart
“[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything.”― Charles de Lint
“Every time you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when you're gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back.” ― Charles de Lint
“Think... of the world you carry within you.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.” ― Charles de Lint
“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.” ― Charles de Lint
“Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.” ― Charles de Lint, The Blue Girl
“It's all a matter of paying attention, being awake in the present moment, and not expecting a huge payoff. The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.” ― Charles de Lint
“There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.” ― Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
“Look inside yourself for the answers - you're the only one who knows what's best for you. Everybody else is only guessing.”
― Charles de Lint, Trader
“I don't think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don't think it's one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them--as many as there are people--because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.”
― Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“I love this world," he added. "That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can, but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands.” ― Charles de Lint, The Little Country
“Not one day in anyone’s life is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull and boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy, or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s-syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness—even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile—reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious and bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, and is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met and never will. All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands. Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, and when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new and better in the ashes, just as from pain and grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength—to the very survival of the human tapestry. Every hour in every life contains such often-unrecognized potential to affect the world that the great days and thrilling possibilities are combined always in this momentous day.” ― Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye
“From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.” ― Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas
“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
“Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.” ― Dean Koontz
“No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.” ― Dean Koontz, A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
“If we were always conscious of the fact that people precious to us are frighteningly mortal, hanging not even by a thread, but by a wisp of gossamer, perhaps we would be kinder to them and more grateful for the love and friendship they give to us.” ― Dean Koontz, Seize the Night
“Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.” ― Dean Koontz, Your Heart Belongs to Me
“This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.” ― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd
“Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, under the star-speckled sky listening to frogs and crickets. Darkness soothed. It softened the sharp edges of the world, toned down the too-harsh colors. With the coming of twilight, the sky seemed to recede; the universe expanded. The night was bigger than the day, and in its realm, life seemed to have more possibilities.” ― Dean Koontz, Midnight
“If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a supporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.” ― Dean Koontz, Life Expectancy
“Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself. ― Nick Flynn
“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action;
and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
and I want my grasp of things to be
true before you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
"“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father's domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.
But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace. He came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.
Are those real islands?' asked the young prince.
Of course they are real islands,' said the man in evening dress.
And those strange and troubling creatures?'
They are all genuine and authentic princesses.'
Then God must exist!' cried the prince.
I am God,' replied the man in full evening dress, with a bow.
The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.
So you are back,' said the father, the king.
I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
Neither real islands, nor real princesses, I have seen God,' said the prince reproachfully.
The king was unmoved.
Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.'
I saw them!'
Tell me how God was dressed.'
God was in full evening dress.'
Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?'
The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.
That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.'
At this, the prince returned to the next land, and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.
My father the king has told me who you are,' said the young prince indignantly. 'You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.'
The man on the shore smiled.
It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father's kingdom there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father's spell, so you cannot see them.'
The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eyes.
Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?'
The king smiled, and rolled back his sleeves.
Yes, my son, I am only a magician.'
Then the man on the shore was God.'
The man on the shore was another magician.'
I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.'
There is no truth beyond magic,' said the king.
The prince was full of sadness.
He said, 'I will kill myself.'
The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.
Very well,' he said. 'I can bear it.'
You see, my son,' said the king, 'you too now begin to be a magician.”
― John Fowles