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1 " Good or bad, happy or sad, everything that happens does so for a reason; no incident in this world is a stray occurrence. Don’t be unnecessarily perplexed or anxious about it- accept it. There’s no point resisting it because it was ordained. A strain of music, perhaps a song, at times a stray incident brings back memories of another day. Some may be nostalgically beautiful others may bring back that ache in the heart that you thought you had overcome long ago. Don’t stop them, let them keep flooding in. They are your memories of an era gone by. Feel them. Relive the good ones. Chew the cud of nostalgia. You will feel energized. The unhappy ones too are welcome, let them in. That pain that you feel once again is the purging of your heart. Feel that the ache for one last time and forgive those that caused the pain. Let go of those memories tenderly. Gently bid them adieu with love. You are a new person now. Those old memories have gone and they have left a space; you are now ready to accept new ones. Fill your life with love; spread it. Live life the way you want to. Do things that you have wanted to do all this while but were afraid to. Live the life that brings you happiness and makes your heart sing with joy... "
2 " Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind. GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. "
― Wilfred Owen , The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
3 " We should all know more, live nearer to God, and grow in grace, if we were more alone. Meditation chews the cud and extracts the real nutriment from the mental food gathered elsewhere. "
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon , Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version
4 " Superfluity was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these hedges, these paths. Vainly I strove to compute the number of the chestnut trees, or their distance from the Velleda, or their height as compared with that of the plane trees; each of them escaped from the pattern I made for it, overflowed from it or withdrew. And I too among them, vile, languorous, obscene, chewing the cud of my thoughts, I too was superfluous. [I is you or I or anyone.] Luckily I did not feel it, I only understood it, but I felt uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it. . . . I thought vaguely of doing away with myself, to do away with at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death – my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden – would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity. "
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea
5 " I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.(" The Graveyard Reader" ) "
