Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.
Approval is overrated…Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don’t care for approval, and I don’t mind doing without.
Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing — by dint of ignorance and innocence — that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.
Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they’ve imagined us.
I care as much as I can, but I don’t spend energy caring about things I cannot resolve.
But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.
Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.
Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.
No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.
What’s big, thick, makes the earth move, and wants to have its way with you?” “I don’t know, but can you introduce me?
And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
Animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.
Night-time is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.
O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI’d lose my fucking mind!
It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.
To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.
Where I’m from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren’t true… we call it history.
Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history
The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it – the human side, say – and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.
The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.
To grow a melody?” “You can’t grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.
Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.
Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It’s so much like home, and then it holds out on you.
Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.
The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
What will I do if I find myself with a heart?” “Lose it constantly, I imagine.
He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.
I like the sound of words, but I don’t ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.
A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we’ve seen previously. We should know better.
Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I’ve learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.
What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.
If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.
At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.
The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.
There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one’s.
Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls…
People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us… It’s people who claim that they’re good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.
It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.
It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.
One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her- is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?
Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on – or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense
The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.
Oh, mercy, there is nothing monstrously ugly about you. Ruth may be unpleasing, but you are merely plain. If anything, it’s my beauty that’s monstrous, for it sweeps away any other aspect of my character.
And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.
You leave home, I have learned, counting the trip day by day. If you ever get to return, you count the trip miracle by miracle.
Do good though, will you?” She blinked brightly at the green girl. “If not for your parents or your grandmother, then for me?
Was it an accident… or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew?
Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.
By so giving up, of course, it renews itself- that is the secret
Isn’t that funny, that deity is passe but the attributes and implications of deity linger–
I hate New Year’s Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven’t yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn’t matter.
Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.
We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out.
We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out.
Night is brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.
Do you expect to learn anything at Shiz?” he asked. “I have already learned not to speak to strangers.” “Then I will introduce myself and we will be strangers no longer. I am Dillamond.” “I am disinclined to know you.
Are you an aberration to your species?’ she cried. ‘Cats don’t look for approval!
Her head had turned quickly away…Not to hide her tears but to soften the fact of their absence.
I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.
Don’t wish,”said Rain, “don’t start. Wishing only…
This is what fun is like,” said Rain, almost to herself.
He was not so lucky. He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
He lingered at the door, and said, ‘The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you wan
So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.
The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.
When you can’t die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.
You can’t be said to have properly established yourself in a place until you have been seen there.
Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant – nothing useful… Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful – if that ever happens anymore.
In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.
It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
I like to think I’m a pretty good-natured guy and pretty civil and probably not ever truly guilty in any serious way of any legal infractions.