it's only temporary

andrea | 27 | Romanian | book lover/blogger

[andreai04]

“If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?”

The boundlessness of space nurtured a dark new humanity in its dark embrace.

Now he saw only the stars and the headstones, the two greatest symbols of eternity.

“I have a dream that one day brilliant sunlight will illuminate the dark forest.”

[andreai04]

"... I thought that life was truly an accident among accidents in the universe. The universe was an empty palace, and humankind the only ant in the entire palace. This kind of thinking infused the second half of my life with a conflicted mentality: Sometimes I thought life was precious, and everything was so important; but other times I thought humans were insignificant, and nothing was worthwhile. Anyway, my life passed day after day accompanied by this strange feeling, and before I knew it, I was old..."

The bugs have never been truly defeated.

[andreai04]

Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world.

The heightened sense of a vast, unknowable design silences the effort to understand. You feel honored simply to be out there. I've been reduced on certain magnificent days—this had happened to me at Honolua Bay, at Jeffreys Bay, on Tavarua, even once or twice at Ocean Beach—to just drifting on the shoulder, gawking at the transformation of ordinary seawater into beautifully muscled swell, into feathering urgency, into pure energy, impossibly sculpted, ecstatically edged, and finally into violent foam.

[andreai04]

But I realized on the morning after we turned away from Mars that I faced a choice: I could look back and see the light of home shrinking day by day and miss its warmth more and more, or I could resist the urge to look.

[andreai04]

I walk along the lower balconies where night mist beads on the stone walls. The waves crash all around the roots of the building. Both were made by man. Perhaps at first in hope, to give our species a new home to live and to love. But in time, I don't know when, their creation became a vanity of will, and in the shadow of that vanity, man grew lesser for having more. Lesser for mastering the keys of creation, because he mistook himself for god, and cared less for his people, and more that his works endured. Have I done the same?

"Daxo taught my son to build castles in the sand. Pax cried when the waves came in. Your brother sat him on his knee and told him that's all life is. Moments you build only to see washed away. But that doesn't mean it's all for nothing." I stop at the door and tap my temple like Daxo tapped Pax's. "The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter."

[andreai04]

“Tell me, what is the purpose of victory if it destroys us?”

The key to learning, to power, to having the final say in everything, is observation. By all means, be a storm inside, but save your movement and wind till you know your purpose.

“It is said that a life is made great by sorrow and joy.”

[andreai04]

“….because there won’t be anyplace but Hell anymore. Not without love. Not without forgiveness.”

[andreai04]

Zero. Mass. Transport. This is supposed to be a civilized space station, in space, why the fuck am I driving a ground vehicle to get to a fucking port on a fucking— (Emotion check: I am absolutely fine.)

She hadn't been foolish or resentful or any of the things Farai had considered, just... trusting. Of an adult human who should have been taking care of her.

…Three looked at me and said, "Perihelion-drone is angry that I didn't follow the plan."

Yeah, I bet. "You know that's a you problem."

"Oh." Three was disconcerted. Welcome to the consequences of your actions, Three. It said hopefully, "It can't be a we problem?"

"No, it can't," I said. "Get in the shuttle."

Mensah just looked at me and said, "SecUnit." In that voice. The voice that's the only reason I'm still here and alive and surrounded by... friends.

[andreai04]

Or has he been doomed since before his birth? Doomed through a thousand incarnations to know little else but sadness and struggle, loneliness and remorse—eternally the champion of some unknown cause?

Justice was not obtained, he believed, by administration but by experience. One must know what it was to suffer humiliation and powerlessness; at least to some degree, before one could entirely appreciate its effect. One must give up power if one was to achieve true justice.

"The struggle between Law and Chaos echoes that struggle within ourselves between unbridled emotion and too much caution, I suppose," Elric mused…

“…legends in themselves have no power. The power comes from the uses that the living make of the legend. The legends merely represent an ideal."

“In the end, we have only ourselves to look to. No cause, no force, no challenge, will ever replace that truth..." "It is to be myself that I travel as I do, Lady Oone," he reminded her.

[andreai04]

Truth has no witness? being isn't knowing? If a person doesn't look and doesn't see, does the truth exist anyway? The truth that doesn't transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person?

…in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.

And the hell is not the torture of pain! it is the torture of a joy.

But now, that I knew that my joy had been suffering, I was wondering if I was fleeing toward a God because I couldn't stand my humanity.

Nature, what I liked about nature, was its vibrating inexpressiveness.

I am not speaking of the future, I am speaking of a permanent present. And that means that hope does not exist because it is no longer a postponed future, it is today. Because the God does not promise. He is much greater than that: He is, and never stops being. We are the ones who cannot stand this always present light, and so we promise it for later, just in order not to feel it today, right this very minute.

Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life living like a sleepwalker? Or was living like a sleepwalker the greatest act of trust? closing one's eyes in dizziness, and never knowing what went on.

Am I speaking of death? no, of life. It is not a state of happiness, it is a state of contact.

Everything that characterizes me is just the way that I am most easily visible to others and how I end up being superficially recognizable to myself.

[andreai04]

And I wonder, in my last moments, if the planet does not mind that we wound her surface or pillage her bounty, because she knows we silly warm things are not even a breath in her cosmic life. We have grown and spread, and will rage and die. And when all that remains of us is our steel monuments and plastic idols, her winds will whisper, her sands will shift, and she will spin on and on, forgetting about the bold, hairless apes who thought they deserved immortality.

In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that's left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.

It takes more to hope than to remember.

If pain is the weight of being, love is the purpose.

[andreai04]

“We are not our station in life. We are us—the sum of what we've done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.”

“In a world of killers, it takes more to be kind than to be wicked.”

“The human spirit tries to break free, again and again, not in hate like the Dark Revolt. But for love. They don't mimic each other. They aren't inspired by others who come before them. Each is willing to take the leap, thinking they are the first. That's bravery. And that means it's a part of who we are as people."

[andreai04]

I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war.

[andreai04]

I hope Andy is down there. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.

But maybe there is something about what the Germans did that exercises a deadly fascination over us—something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right—or wrong—set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them.

Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that's all. It's not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.

…as if such determination in a world as hard and as senseless as this one meant nothing... or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any difference at all.

[andreai04]

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.

Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way. Some people drown, that's all. It's not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.

[andreai04]

So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction?

"There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It's hard to live in all those kinds of time. Easy to forget that you live in all of them."

But this, I realized, was the faith that had deserted me. The faith in Big Salvation… It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn't the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

“The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence."

[andreai04]

You have my word—it's a simple phrase, and easy on the lips; my word is nothing more than what I am, and it's broken as easily as men are. But it's also nothing less than what I am, and it has the same lust for survival that I do. I spread my hands in a disparaging shrug. "What would my word mean?" A rhetorical question. "It would place no chains upon my arms that could prevent the raising of my fist."

There is nothing easier than happiness; it's the feeling that comes when you're open to the life that flows through you, when you know that you are the river and the river is you.