7
" What are these two lies - these Illusions - that for too long have done their best to keep us from a real peace where we can still remain human? One is certainly the glory of war. It offers us cheaply, but with tragic results, a sense of power in the face of that 20th Century helplessness and powerlessness we hear so much about. War is about the power that fear demands of us, isn't it? Power, after all (the lie assures us), is what the world is really about, isn't it? The meek are fools. The reasonable are suckers. If you really believe in your country, your family, your values, you will wage war to protect them - because there is indeed an Enemy out there and the Enemy, like a host of fallen angels, is out to destroy everything you value. By waging war you'll be redeemed by war's very violence, won't you? The consequences of this are of course terrible: the perpetuation of Power Uber Alles, of war itself, of the assumption that whether we win or lose our submission to Power redeems us. "
― Bruce McAllister
9
" In all my close friendships, words are the bricks I use to build bridges. To know someone I need to hear her, and to feel known, I need to be heard by her. The process of knowing and loving another person happens for me through conversation. I reveal something to help my friend understand me, she responds in a way that assures me she values my revelation, and then she adds something to help me understand her. This back-and-forth is repeated again and again as we go deeper into each other's hearts, minds, pasts, and dreams. Eventually, a friendship is built - a solid, sheltering structure that exists in the space between us - a space outside of ourselves that we can climb deep into. There is her, there is me, and then there is our friendship - this bridge we've built together. "
― Glennon Doyle Melton , Love Warrior
19
" Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.
To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. "
― Walter Pater , The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
20
" Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I? "
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves
