4
" If I could forget you! Is my love then a work of memory? Even if time expunged everything from its tablets, expunged even memory itself, my relation to you would stay just as alive, you would still not be forgotten. If I could forget you! What then should I remember? For after all, I have forgotten myself in order to remember you: so if I forgot you I would come to remember myself; but the moment I remembered myself I would have to remember you again. If I could forget you! What would happen then? There is a picture from antiquity. It depicts Ariadne. She is leaping up from her couch and gazing anxiously after a ship that is hurrying away under full sail. By her side stands Cupid with unstrung bow and drying his eyes. Behind her stands a winged female figure in a helmet. It is usually assumed this is Nemesis. Imagine this picture, imagine it changed a little. Cupid is not weeping and his bow is not unstrung; or would you have become less beautiful, less victorious, if I had become mad? Cupid smiles and bends his bow. Nemesis does not stand inactive by your side; she too draws her bow. In that other picture we see a male figure on the ship, busily occupied. It is assumed it is Theseus. Not so in my picture. He stands on the stern, he looks back longingly, spreads his arms. He has repented, or rather, his madness has left him, but the ship carries him away. Cupid and Nemesis both aim at him, an arrow flies from each bow; their aim is true; one sees that, one understands, they have both hit the same place in his heart, a sign that his love was the Nemesis that wrought vengeance."
―Johannes de Silentio, from_Either/Or: A Fragment of Life_ "
― Søren Kierkegaard
7
" Jon Snow, is this a proper castle now? Not just a tower?”
“It is.” Jon took her hand.
“Good,” she whispered. “I wanted t’ see one proper castle, before … before I …”
“You’ll see hundred castles. The battle’s done. Maester Aemon will see to you. You’re kissed by fire, remember? Lucky. It will take more than an arrow to kill you. Aemon will draw it out and patch you up, and we’ll get milk of the poppy for the pain.”
She just smiled at that. “D’you remember that cave? We should have stayed in that cave. I told you so.”
“We’ll go back to the cave,” he said.” You’re not going to die, Ygritte. You’re not.”
“Oh.” Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she sighed, dying. "
― George R.R. Martin , A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3)
8
" Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students. He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered. We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don't need to know the whole history. We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion. Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them. It's obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we'll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth. "
― Will Tuttle , The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
11
" I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.
I know a charm that will heal with a touch.
I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.
I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.
A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it.
A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.
A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it.
An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.
A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.
For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.
An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes.
A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.
A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.
A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.
A fifteenth: I had a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe in my dreams.
A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.
A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.
And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one know but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be. "
― Neil Gaiman , American Gods (American Gods, #1)
17
" A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until--" My God," says a second man, " I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience... " Look, look!" recites the crowd. " A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer. "
18
" Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.
I was lone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and nigh swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache. "
― Pablo Neruda , Selected Poems
20
" The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That's a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth. "
― Robert M. Pirsig , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)
