2
" Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun... One feels that this inexhaustible fancy is weary at last and worn out with continual exercise, because one is growing into manhood, outgrowing one's old ideals: they are being shattered into fragments, into dust; if there is no other life one must build one up from the fragments. And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him! "
― Fyodor Dostoevsky , White Nights
11
" This is what I think about
when I shovel compost
into a wheelbarrow,
and when I fill the long flower boxes,
then press into rows
the limp roots of red impatiens—
the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth
from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.
Then the soil is full of marvels,
bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam.
Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue,
the clouds a brighter white,
and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone,
the small plants singing
with lifted faces, and the click
of the sundial
as one hour sweeps into the next. "
― Billy Collins , Picnic, Lightning
12
" UP
You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
there is birdsong,
you can't get out of bed.
It's something about the crumpled sheets
hanging over the edge like jungle
foliage, the terry slippers gaping
their dark pink mouths for your feet,
the unseen breakfast--some of it
in the refrigerator you do not dare
to open--you will not dare to eat.
What prevents you? The future. The future tense,
immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density
and drowned events pressing you down,
like sea water, like gelatin
filling your lungs instead of air.
Forget all that and let's get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house is on fire
and you must run or burn.
No, that one's useless.
It's never worked before.
Where is it coming form, this echo,
this huge No that surrounds you,
silent as the folds of the yellow
curtains, mute as the cheerful
Mexican bowl with its cargo
of mummified flowers?
(You chose the colours of the sun,
not the dried neutrals of shadow.
God knows you've tried.)
Now here's a good one:
you're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive? "
― Margaret Atwood , Morning in the Burned House
14
" I know for a fact that no matter where I go, the memory and the suffering of not being with you will cripple me. I will go to work, fire up my PC, only to check if you're online. I will hover the pointer to your name, it will pop your contact details--just the contact details, no photo, no one-liners, no sign of what we used to have--but I shall linger and stare at it for hours. I will attempt to start a chat, but will close it without even a word to type. I will try to divert my thoughts back to work. But will fail. I will always go back to you. One hour to another, it's 5 PM. I pack my things, unproductive for the day and smile. I'm doing that again tomorrow and the next. "
― CSTPimentel
15
" Time is the only magic, he said, " And Marids swim through time like the sea. Think: if you hurt yourself, and I bandage it, and after weeks and weeks it gets well and there's no scar, that's not magic at all. But if you hurt yourself and I touch you and it heals in a moment, you'd call me magic before your skin closed. It's not magic to cook a feast, roasting and baking and frying for hours, but if you blink and it's steaming in front of you, it's a spell. If you work for what you want and save for it and plan it out just as precisely as you possibly can, it's not even surprising if you get it on the other side of a month or a year. But if you snap your fingers and it happens as soon as you want t, every wizard will want to know you socially. If you life straight through a hundred years and watch yourself unfold at one second per second, one hour per hour, that's just being alive. If you go faster, you're a time traveler. If you jump over your unfolding and see how it all comes out, that's fate. But's all healing and cooking and planning and living, just the same. The only difference is time. "
20
" I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was.
But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours
because the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life. "
― Malcolm X , The Autobiography of Malcolm X