3
" Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude. "
― Anaïs Nin , The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
8
" There's a man who is my brother,
I just don't know his name,
But I know his home and family,
Because I know we feel the same,
And it hurts me when he's hungry,
Or when his children cry,
I too am a father,
That little one is mine
It's about time we begin it,
To turn the world around,
It's about time we start to make it,
The dream we've always known,
It's about time we start to live it,
The family of man,
It's about time,
It's about changes,
And it's about time,
It's about you and me together,
And it's about time "
― John Denver
14
" And so it was that Michael built a brown castle on the peak of his mountain, Gabriel built a golden pyramid in the midst of his plain, saying it was both a holy temple in my praise and an edifice that would guide him on his pattern for his future work, though I knew that only he would ever understand it, to my amusement, and Raphael built a silver palace to sparkle above the trees of his forests, as his home and celestial workshop, and I was well pleased with their work, as ever it was better than what I had hoped for. " That was the First Age, the Archangel Age, long over. I can speak in much detail about each stage in my creation, and my scribes have written all my words on each stage in the books I gave to the angel courts, for study and meditation and for prayer, but such details are for my sons and daughters most interested in them, when they are of an age, with the understanding, to comprehend such things. "
15
" If Ever You Feel Down, Remember, 100Trillion Cells Make Up Your Body and ALL each of them cares About is You.Our body is made up of about100,000 Billions of cells (100 Trillion)... all living working and sacrificing themselves completely for the exclusive benefit, well-being, and survival of the whole (which is you). We are each of us a universe unto ourselves.To put 100 Trillion in perspective...Jeremy Harper counted from one to one million in about 3 months. He did NOTHING but count, eat, and sleep (minimal). During this time; he didn't leave his home nor even shave. And that's only one MILLION, so if you ignore the fact that pronunciation takes much, much longer on ever larger numbers (more than a minute each), counting to 100 Trillion would take more than 25 Million years.It's awe inspiring to think that 100 Trillion cells (worlds) are counting ON me also, my decisions determine (to a large degree) whether they are allowed to continue living and experiencing in this life or not.Knowing all of this, who could realistically say that there are no miracles. We each have over 100 Trillion miracles working FOR us and depending ON us each and every second of every day.So when praying, I must always keep in mind that each word is in behalf of 100 Trillion worlds.OUR Father Who Art in Heaven... "
16
" You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy's leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there's a difference, like the banker's just doing his job but the loan shark's a criminal. I like the loan shark better because he doesn't pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be where I am sitting right now. I'm not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men's club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid's grades. Die at my desk, and they'll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt's hit the coffin. "
― Dennis Lehane , Live by Night (Coughlin, #2)
17
" Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,’ said the unforgiving man. – 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – 'It was the vase,’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole. "
― Salman Rushdie
19
" Peter Friedrich, wer bin ich? Peter Frederick, who am I? German or American? The answer was neither and both. I had German blood but an American mentality.This trip allowed me to understand that a man can make his home where ever he chooses. If I wanted, I could live happily in America. My heart fought and pleaded, saying it wasn't true, that I was German, and only in Germany would I be content. In one of the few times in my life, intellect overruled emotion. Germany wasn't the key to my happiness. I couldn't deny what I had experienced, and my last hope for a key to the castle door died. International adoption destroyed the connection to my heritage. It is only conjuncture to guess how my life might have turned out under different circumstances, but there is one certainty: If I had remained in the orphanage or had been adopted by German parents, I never would have suffered the loss of my national identity. If I had to be adopted by Americans, then they should have been of German descent. "