thoughts underlined

[thoughtsunderlined]

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

— The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)

[thoughtsunderlined]

The Night Migrations

This is the moment when you see again

the red berries of the mountain ash

and in the dark sky

the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think

the dead won’t see them -

these things we depend on,

they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?

I tell myself maybe it won’t need

these pleasures anymore;

maybe just not being is simply enough,

hard as that is to imagine.

LOUISE GLUCK (1943)

[thoughtsunderlined]

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Søren Kierkegaard

[thoughtsunderlined]

It is frequently at the edges of things that we learn most about the middle: ice and steam can reveal more about the nature of water than water alone ever could.

Walter Murch (In The Blink Of An Eye)

[thoughtsunderlined]

Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.

Frederick Sommer

[thoughtsunderlined]

if the life I chose is the life I chose.

if my self is a shadow, at least I made

a dent in the light.

(from “if...else” by Cyril Wong)

[thoughtsunderlined]

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Henry David Thoreau (Life without principle)

[thoughtsunderlined]

We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.

John Steinbeck

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Was the love of Judas' mother for her son less than the love of Mary for Jesus?

Kahlil Gibran (Sand and foam)

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And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.

Michel De Montaigne (On experience)

[thoughtsunderlined]

Only love and death will change all things.

Kahlil Gibran (Sand and foam)

[thoughtsunderlined]

Three other miracles of Jesus

"There are three miracles of our Brother Jesus not yet recorded in the Book: the first that He was a man like you and me, the second that He had a sense of humor, and the third that He knew He was a conqueror though conquered." —Kahlil Gibran (Sand and foam)

[thoughtsunderlined]

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

George Orwell (1984)

[thoughtsunderlined]

It is also good to love; because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, a work for which all other work is merely preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a young poet)

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I am the sigh of the sea; The laughter of the field; The tears of heaven.

Kahlil Gibran (Song of the Rain)

[thoughtsunderlined]

Beauty is that which attract your soul, And that which loves to give and not to receive.

Kahlil Gibran (Before the Throne of Beauty)

[thoughtsunderlined]

I am the human heart, prisoner of substance and victim of earthly laws.

Kahlil Gibran (Vision)