10
" Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of one who is dear to you, today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be an anxiety about money, the next day the slanders of a calumniator, the day after the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then a pleasure for which you are reproached by your conscience or your vertebral column; another time, the course of public affairs. Not to mention heartaches. And so on. One cloud is dissipated, another gathers. Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who are lucky! As for other men, stagnant night is upon them. "
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables
14
" It had been a nice night, but not one they’d repeat. Like, ever.Why was he dialing his phone?A few rings later, a familiar voice picked up on the other end. “Whitman.”Dammit, my subconscious really is out to get me. “Matt? Brennan. I was wondering if…” make it something good, “…you…wanted to…” his gaze flew around the room, settling on his DVD shelf, “…watch Star Wars with me?”Star Wars? A hundred DVDs on the shelf and he settled on fucking Star Wars? He was never going to get in Matt’s pants ever again.There was a pause on the other end.Great, I’ve scared him off with my closet geekery. Go me.“Which one?”His heart skipped a beat. Or not.“I have all six.”“My favorite is Strikes Back. I can be at my place in about twenty. I’ll bring food?” Brennan’s eyes squeezed closed and he grinned, kicking his feet in delight. I am such a girl. “You know we can’t watch Strikes Back without immediately going to Return, right?”“We should pace ourselves. Star Wars is serious business. Usually I don’t watch them without consuming about five pounds of Skittles and three bottles of Coke.”“I’ll grab the junk food. We can pull an all -nighter.”“It’s a weeknight.” Matt sounded ridiculously disappointed about the fact, which was so happy-dance-worthy that Brennan almost literally jumped out of his chair. “But maybe we could turn it into a three-part date? Start tonight? End Friday? "
17
" High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. "
― John Gillespie Magee Jr.
19
" Killing a bunch of Jihadis may be morally justified, to save humanity from their wrath, but it won't terminate Jihad for long. Jihad or Holy war would keep festering one way or another, until religious fundamentalism is eradicated from the human society. Until the whole humanity learns to scrutinize its most revered scriptures with the sharp tool of reasoning, Jihad will keep on striking over the world. If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age. No Quran, no Bible, no Gita, no Cow, is greater than the human self. There shall be hope for harmony and peace in the world, only when fundamentalism is destroyed forever. Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised. "
― Abhijit Naskar
20
" We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use. "
― Annie Dillard , Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters