calamus-gladio-fortoir-blog - Tumblr blog

[calamus-gladio-fortoir-blog]

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

Václav Havel, Dear Dr. Husák

[calamus-gladio-fortoir-blog]

You see what power is – holding someone else’s fear in your hand and showing it to them.

Amy Tan, The Kitchen God’s Wife

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But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Margaret Atwood (Offred), The Handmaid’s Tale

[calamus-gladio-fortoir-blog]

Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?

Tennessee Williams

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The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

[calamus-gladio-fortoir-blog]

People make too much of facts. Also people make too much of gut feelings. Gut feelings probably mean food poisoning.

Brian Doyle, The Plover

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Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks

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I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

Anthony Doerr, Memory Wall

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But that’s the wonderful thing about foreign travel, suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most basic sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

Bill Bryan

[calamus-gladio-fortoir-blog]

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

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Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind

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I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory.

Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story

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Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

[calamus-gladio-fortoir-blog]

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Diane Ackerman, The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

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The oldest, shortest words - 'yes' and 'no' - are those which require the most thought.

Pythagoras