s QUOTES

1 " When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground it makes a loud crashing sound. When a window shatters a table leg breaks or when a picture falls off the wall it makes a noise. But as for your heart when that breaks it s completely silent. You would think as it s so important it would make the loudest noise in the whole world or even have some ... Read Moresort of ceremonious sound like the gong of a cymbal or the ringing of a bell. But it s silent and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain. If there is a noise it s internal. It screams and no one can hear it but you. It screams so loud your ears ring and your head aches. It trashes around in your chest like a great white shark caught in the sea it roars like a mother bear whose cub has been taken. That s what it looks like and that s what it sounds like a trashing panicking trapped great big beast roaring like a prisoner to its own emotions. But that s the thing about love no one is untouchable. "

― Cecelia Ahern , If You Could See Me Now

2 " A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name. "

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Poisonwood Bible

3 " You think money can solve any problem, but all it s good for is buying the things it can, and leaving you free to pursue the things it can't. "

4 " no man is free until he s a master of himself!! "

― Epictetus

5 " In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure. "

― , The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France

6 " I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,

but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.

I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers

from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal

pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue

ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror

over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted

in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing

and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord

around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u

and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels

and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I’d jump off the roof of your office building

just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish
we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see

what the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there,
and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance

to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver,
hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire.

And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine
supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re

injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:

Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,

and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,

washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,

like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,

like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love

when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting

into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself

with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her

how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect the first straw; because no one

ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late. "

― Jeffrey McDaniel

7 " The Old FoolsWhat do they think has happened, the old fools,To make them like this ? Do they somehow supposeIt's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and droolsAnd you keep on pissing yourself, and can't rememberWho called this morning ? Or that, if they only chose,They could alter things back to when they danced all night,Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September ?Or do they fancy there's really been no change, And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,Or sat through days of thin continuous dreamingWatching light move ? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:Why aren't they screaming ?At death, you break up: the bits that were youStart speeding away from each other for everWith no one to see. It's only oblivion, true: We had it before, but then it was going to end,And was all the time merging with a unique endeavourTo bring to bloom the million-petalled flowerOf being here. Next time you can't pretendThere'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:Not knowing how, not hearing who, the powerOf choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines-How can they ignore it ?Perhaps being old is having lighted roomsInside your head, and people in them, acting.People you know, yet can't quite name; each loomsLike a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, Setting down a Iamp, smiling from a stair, extractingA known book from the shelves; or sometimes onlyThe rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,The blown bush at the window, or the sun' sFaint friendliness on the wall some lonelyRain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:Not here and now, but where all happened once.This is why they giveAn air of baffled absence, trying to be thereYet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leavingIncompetent cold, the constant wear and tearOf taken breath, and them crouching belowExtinction' s alp, the old fools, never perceivingHow near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet.The peak that stays in view wherever we goFor them is rising ground. Can they never tellWhat is dragging them back, and how it will end ? Not at night?Not when the strangers come ? Never, throughoutThe whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,We shall find out. "

8 " She reads his poems gratefully in her small Mississippi town. It's an undramatic life, yet these past months she seems to have found the intensity he yearns for, This also sounds like bragging, though she doesn't mean it to. If she could, she'd let him bear her secret. She'd let all great men bear it, for s few hours. Then, when she too it back, they'd remember how it feels to be inhabited. "

9 " This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. "

― Leon Uris

10 " It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant. "

― Clive Barker

11 " The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination. "

― Charles Darwin

12 " Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that s not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus teh struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under. "

13 " A person' s life is a cycle that involves both his or her events of success and failure. A person should understand that most obstacles can be overcomed, but some of his or her barriers that he or she is born with could not be broken. It can be under control if the person understands his or her own identity. "

14 " Eureka!" s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong. "

15 " This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias. "

― , What Is the What

16 " Some women I talk to are so frightened of growing old. I sense their desperation. They say things like I m not going to live to be old I m not going to live to be dependent. The message young women get from youth culture is that it s wonderful to be young and terrible to grow old. If you think about it it s an impossible dilemma how can you make a good start in life if you are being told at the same time how terrible the finish is Because of ageism many women don t fully commit themselves to living life until they can no longer pass as young. They live their lives with one foot in life and one foot outside it. With age you resolve that. I know the value of each day and I m living with both feet in life. I m living much more fully... The power of the old woman is that because she s outside the system she can attack. And I am determined to attack it. One of the ways in which I am particularly conscious of this stance is when I go down the street. People expect me to move over which means to step on the grass or off the curb. I just woke up one day to the fact that I was moving over. I have no idea how many years I ve been doing that. Now I never move over. I simply keep walking. And we hit full force because the other person is so sure that I am going to move over that he isn t even paying any attention and we simply ram each other. If it s a man with a woman he shows embarrassment because he s just knocked down a five foot seventy year old woman and so he quickly apologises. But he s startled he doesn t understand why I didn t move over he doesn t even know how I got there where I came from. I am invisible to him despite the fact that I am on my own side of the street simply refusing to give him that space he assumes is his "

17 " An instrument s a tool that is actively used to change something, and God has called all of his people to be instruments of change in his redemptive hands "

― Paul David Tripp , Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

18 " Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutter's land, Guerrero' s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.

The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land. "

― John Steinbeck , The Grapes of Wrath

19 " Everything hurts. He can barely lie still. He feels caught. He wants to run, but where? He feels certain he will always remain like this - trapped within his own body, his own mind. The emotional pain is so strong, it becomes physical. He feels it knotting and twisting inside him, ready to crush him, suffocate him. He is losing his grip, he is losing his mind. He thought he had it all back under control, but suddenly nothing makes sense any more. Does anyone else know what it's like to be stuck somewhere between dead and alive? I't s a half-world of incoherent pain where emotions you put on ice start slowly thawing again. A place where everything hurts, where your mind is no longer strong enough to force your feelings back into hibernation. "

― Tabitha Suzuma , Hurt

20 " I am in Love with you, it’s me who is in love with you not you,I am in love with you.Not in a way I wanted to but yeah the way I am fond toHey I am in love with you,not treating you like I wanted to but just being the one that thought of toyeah I am in love with you,Loving you was the secrete I wanted to keepand buried deep inside my emotional heap,Doing everything possible what I had toBut baby it hurts as it hurts you too,but yeah still I am in love with you,Pulled myself million times because I got the wrong vibes all the time,But the truth remains the samebaby hear me as I am in love with you,Waiting on you I could see people were laughing on meI knew all the while you weren't near me.But you should know that I am in love with youThere were some days I missed you a lot and scared to tell you how i feel cold and hotfor you as I am in love with you is the only dreamAnd then I am in love with youI remember I have cried to sleepand bagged myself to keep you awayfrom the highest steepthe voice that said from within me I am in love with youJust I LOVE YOU was the only words I wanna hear from youeven while knowing, you don’t mean toBecause simply I feel the way I wanted toLoving to say I am in love with you.wake up in the morning with only you in my mind till I sleep at deep way in the nightI know its all silly things for your kindbut its perfect to me as clearly - deeply in love with youWhen you being nice to me that scares me sometimesbut bottom in my heart it feels so nice because during that timeI am in love with you,Doesn't matter whatever I do with you even things i have never done beforeand i enjoyed them all because simply as I am in love with you.In the first waiting on you was the favorite thing in my dayweather it s a call or just a look from you from the farthest bayI asked myself why and the voice within me said that I am in love with you. "

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