4
" I am not a believer in love at first sight. For love, in its truest form, is not the thingof starry-eyed or star-crossed lovers, it is far more organic, requiring nurturing and timeto fully bloom, and, as such, seen best not in its callow youth but in its wrinkled maturity.Like all living things, love, too, struggles against hardship, and in the process shedsits fatuous skin to expose one composed of more than just a storm of emotion–one of loyaltyand divine friendship. Agape. And though it may be temporarily blinded by adversity,it never gives in or up, holding tight to lofty ideals that transcend this earth andtime–while its counterfeit simply concludes it was mistaken and quickly runs off tofind the next real thing. "
5
" Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. " Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things. "
20
" A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny. "
― Fernando Pessoa , The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
