1
" When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever for one moment, accepts it. Everybody knows that everybody dies. But not every day. Not today. Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. (In the library, the Doctor walks back to the TARDIS. He stops, looking at the doors. Then he raises his hand, and stands there poised like that for a long moment. Finally he snaps his fingers. The doors open. He smiles slowly and walks in, joining Donna. Then he snaps his fingers again, and the doors close. River's voice continues over this.) Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair, and the Doctor comes to call... everybody lives. "
― Steven Moffat
2
" And I do. I do wonder, I think about it all the time. What it would be like to kill myself. Because I never really know, I still can't tell the difference, I'm never quite certain whether or not I'm actually alive. I sit here every single day. Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you're a blur that blends into the background.
Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and you run.
Run run run until you can't hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.
Run until you drop dead. Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.
Run, I said. "
― , Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2)
4
" When an animal dies, another of the same species may cling to the body, eat the body, or look bored. Bees expel dead bodies from the hive or, if that is impossible, embalm them in honey. Elephants " say" a ritualistic good-bye, and touch their dead before slowly walking away. Corvids often accept the death of a companion without much fuss, but they at times have “funerals,” where scores of birds lament over the corpse of a deceased crow. But it is a bit odd that people should investigate whether animals “comprehend death,” as if human beings understood what it means to die. Is death a prelude to reincarnation? A portal to Heaven or Hell? Complete extinction? Union with all life? Or something else? All of these views can at times be comforting, yet people usually fear death, quite regardless of what they claim to believe.In the natural world, killing seems a casual affair. Human beings, of course, kill on a massive scale, but most of us can only kill, if at all, by softening the impact of the deed through rituals such as drink or prayer. The strike of a spider, a heron, or a cat is swift and, seemingly, without inhibition or remorse. They pounce with a confidence that could indicate ignorance, indifference, or else profound knowledge. Could this be, perhaps, because animals cannot conceive of killing, since they are not aware of death? Could it be because they understand death well, far better than do human beings?If animals envision the world not in terms of abstract concepts but sensuous images, the soul might appear as a unique scent, a rhythmic motion, or a tone of voice. Death would be the absence of these, though without that absolute finality that we find so severe. Perhaps the heron that snaps a fish thinks his meal lives on, as he one day will, in the form of currents in the pond. "
6
" Love dies when the lover in us dies. It snaps when the lover in us gives up in defeat. When the cold, practical us takes over the the self-image of us a lover. When the lover in us wins, the practical us recedes and the magic takes over, and when the lover in us loses, the practical us takes over and the magic recedes and the more the lover in us dies, the less courage we have in magic until we reach a point where we even disbelieve the very notion of magic, and magic within us. Who would believe the madness of moonlight in broad daylight? Love dies from hunger for love that love is unable to feed. If I tell you that just as the cold rays of harsh sunlight shall give away to the silver cool of the moonlight beams, your disbelief can turn to magic,are you going to believe? That the stars are there even during the day, that we are the ones unable to see, would you believe? "
― Srividya Srinivasan
7
" But what I would like to know," says Albert, " is whether there would not have been a war if the Kaiser had said No." " I'm sure there would," I interject, " he was against it from the first." " Well, if not him alone, then perhaps if twenty or thirty people in the world had said No." " That's probable," I agree, " but they damned well said Yes." " It's queer, when one thinks about it," goes on Kropp, " we are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who's in the right?" " Perhaps both," say I without believing it." Yes, well now," pursues Albert, and I see that he means to drive me into a corner, " but our professors and parsons and newspapers say that we are the only ones that are right, and let's hope so;--but the French professors and parsons and newspapers say that the right is on their side, now what about that?" " That I don't know," I say, " but whichever way it is there's war all the same and every month more countries coming in." Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started." Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority.Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. " A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." " Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?" growls Kropp, " I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other--" " Then I haven't any business here at all," replies Tjaden, " I don't feel myself offended." " Well, let me tell you," says Albert sourly, " it doesn't apply to tramps like you." " Then I can be going home right away," retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh, " Ach, man! he means the people as a whole, the State--" exclaims Mller." State, State" --Tjaden snaps his fingers contemptuously, " Gendarmes, police, taxes, that's your State;--if that's what you are talking about, no, thank you." " That's right," says Kat, " you've said something for once, Tjaden. State and home-country, there's a big difference." " But they go together," insists Kropp, " without the State there wouldn't be any home-country." " True, but just you consider, almost all of us are simple folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks. Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren't asked about it any more than we were." " Then what exactly is the war for?" asks Tjaden.Kat shrugs his shoulders. " There must be some people to whom the war is useful." " Well, I'm not one of them," grins Tjaden." Not you, nor anybody else here." " Who are they then?" persists Tjaden. " It isn't any use to the Kaiser either. He has everything he can want already." " I'm not so sure about that," contradicts Kat, " he has not had a war up till now. And every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous. You look in your school books." " And generals too," adds Detering, " they become famous through war." " Even more famous than emperors," adds Kat." There are other people back behind there who profit by the war, that's certain," growls Detering." I think it is more of a kind of fever," says Albert. " No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn't want the war, the others say the same thing--and yet half the world is in it all the same. "
10
" I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are.
I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems.
So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…
The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world. "
― Annie Dillard , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
15
" We fight monsters and unholy creatures for a living here. Grotesque, evil, violent, dangerous; they’re certainly all these things. And yet, we somehow manage to go to sleep each night and wake up each morning. The terror wears off. What was horrific becomes mundane. We lose ourselves to a numbed normalcy after a while, a self-inflicted detachment. You forget how you got here, what it was like before. And then someone comes along, someone new, someone who sees it all with fresh eyes, and it snaps you out of your daily coma, reminding you of what you’ve forgotten. Of what you’ve become. "
― , No Good Deed (Kelly & Umber, #1)
17
" Society, because it is composed of living humans, is organic and if healthy, supple. It is like a rubber band. As long as the groups that compose society are flexible and social and emotionally supporting, it serves its constituency well. It bends, weaves, twists, turns, and envelops everyone in diverse manners. If opposing forces become too locked into their polarized viewpoints, though, other things happen.
Like two grumpy siblings, they hold their views with anger or self-righteousness and utter vulgar and crass words, but it amounts to the same thing. The two groups pull on the rubber band and rigidly hold to their position without empathy.
The rubber band (society) grows taut and then eventually it snaps and collateral damage ensues and the proverbial baby is thrown out with the bath water. "
― Leviak B. Kelly , Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
19
" Time went by and there wasn’t even sadness.
“You know how another patient put it? She said this feeling inside her was . . . it was anti-feeling. Like a black hole in space, and everything—happiness, anger, hope, meaning—it would all get sucked in, tipped over the event horizon, and she couldn’t feel any of it. That’s the way it was for me. I walked around like everyone else, and had this wonderful opportunity at the museum, and came home to this brilliant guy who loved me and was nothing but sweet. Your father tried so hard. But I felt . . . empty. If I could’ve filled that space up with anything, I would’ve. If somebody had turned to me and said, ‘It’s easy, just pour some dry cement in there and you’ll be a normal human girl,’ I would’ve done it like that.” She snaps her fingers. “But I couldn’t. And your father couldn’t do it for me. "
― Rebecca Podos , The Mystery of Hollow Places
20
" Who am I?" she snaps. " I am America, Israel, England! What am I doing?" She waits another long moment, her eyes shining. " I'm shutting up and listening." She draws the last word out so it hisses through the air. " I am the presidents, the kings, the prime ministers, the highs and the mighties—L-I-S-T-E-N!" She spells the word in the air. " The woman who made the baklava has something to say to you! Voilà! You see? Now what am I doing?" She picks up an imaginary plate, lifts something from it, and takes an invisible bite. Then she closes her eyes and says, " Mmm... That is such delicious Arabic-Jordanian-Lebanese-Palestinian baklawa. Thank you so much for sharing it with us! Please will you come to our home now and have some of our food?" She puts down the plate and brushes imaginary crumbs from her fingers. " So now what did I just do? " You ate some baklawa?" She curls her hand as if making a point so essential, it can be held only in the tips of the fingers. " I looked, I tasted, I spoke kindly and truthfully. I invited. You know what else? I keep doing it. I don't stop if it doesn't work on the first or the second or the third try. And like that!" She snaps the apron from the chair into the air, leaving a poof of flour like a wish. " There is your peace. "
