Bruckle Things

...people who devote themselves to goddesses must exercise some caution about the ones to whom they are devoted, they neither chose them by the passing standards of the flesh alone, nor abandoned it lightly when the bruckle thing began to fail. -T.H. White, The Once and Future King

[brucklethings]

"Love is certainly never safe, but it's absolutely worth it."

--Talia Hibbert, Get a Life, Chloe Brown

[brucklethings]

“They [olympic athletes] remind us that we are all connected. That our strength comes from how we treat each other, and that the best of humanity is found in courage, compassion, and kindness.”

— Kristy Coventry

[brucklethings]

"That is petty, but not improper."

-- A Judge in Canada

[brucklethings]

"I clutch the brimming warmth of her thigh and think about the fact that -- even at its most hopeful -- my measly brain could never have dreamt up something as infinitely intoxicating as her."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"It is our life's work to mistrust our measures, especially those about moral and mental standing. ... To remember that a category is at best a proxy, at worst, a shackle."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

on how science is constantly evolving, and we discover that things considered immutable facts were, in fact, mutable

[brucklethings]

"Scientists have discovered, it's true, that employing positive allusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside the tunnel vision of your goals."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"How my oldest sister will, in an act so emblematic of her -- her caring, her conscientiousness, her hyper-punctuality -- write and mail my father a condolence card that arrives somehow a day early. How the next day, a few minutes after his mother dies, he will think of my sister's card and he will laugh; the first rupture of warmth on that bleakest of days."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"The best way of ensuring that you don't miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit with every breath that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of chaos with curiosity, with doubt."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"Life, the flipside of death; growth, of rot."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them, not because I worked for them, but because they are as much a part of chaos as destruction, and loss."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"What other truths are waiting behind the lines we draw over nature? ... The longer we examine our world, the stranger it proves to be."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"Snorkel is best invention. God bless snorkel inventor. It win peace prize?"

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"There is another world, but it is in this one."

--Paul Éluard

[thedevilsrain]

every single translator: get his ass

[argumate]

Hungarian translator: I'm on it

[brucklethings]

"From the perspective of the stars, or infinity... sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that one person could be so much more. A stand in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving ones darkest years."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"In other words, a rosy view of yourself was anathema to self development. A way to keep yourself stagnant, stunted, morally inchoate. A fast track to sad sackery."

--Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

[brucklethings]

"You don't matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite, so live as you please. ... He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don't matter either, treat them like they do. He has made my mom coffee almost every day for half a century. He is devoted to his students: they came to our holiday meals, they sometimes lived in our home. ... What could be a grim reality has instead pumped his life full of vigor, has made him live big and good. I have strived my whole life to follow in his nihilistic clown-shoed footsteps; to stare our pointlessness in the face and waddle along toward happiness because of it."

--Lulu Miller Why Fish Don't Exist