19 posts tagged “books”

"On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past."

— Stanislaw Lem

6. A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. "I shall be yours," she told him, "when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window." But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

 I'm not going to lie and tell you that the future is full of promises. He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by feelings that nothing was right, or nothing was fulfilled, alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in the aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over. I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others - the only thing worse than being sad is others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
	Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,
	Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
	That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,
	Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
	Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
	But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
	I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


			 William Shakespeare   
				(1564 - 1616)

"If I had a camera," I said, "I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life."
"I look exactly the same."
"No, you don't. You're changing all the time. Every day a tiny bit. If I could, I'd keep a record of it all."
"If you're so smart, how did I change today?"
"You got a fraction of a millimeter taller, for one thing. Your hair grew a fraction of a millimeter longer. And your breasts grew a fraction of a--"
"They did not!"
"Yes, they did!"
"Did NOT."
"Did too."
"What else, you big pig!"
"You got a little happier and also a little sadder."
"Meaning they cancel each other out, leaving me exactly the same."
"Not at all. The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and the saddest you've ever been in your whole life."
"How do you know?"
"Think about it. Have you ever been happier than right now, lying here in the grass?"
"No."
"It isn't like that for everyone, you know. Some people, like your sister, just get happier and happier everyday. And some people, like Beyla Asch, just get sadder and sadder. And some people, like you, get both."
"What about you? Are you the happiest and saddest right now that you've ever been?"
"Of course I am."
"Why?"
"Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you."

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

- No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July

"I don't love you," he told her one evening as they lay naked in the grass. 

She kissed his brow and said, "I know that. And I'm sure you know that I don't love you."

"Of course," he said, although it came as a great suprise-- not that she didn't love him, but that she would say it. In the past seven years of lovemaking he had heard the words so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women had said I love you without ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It suprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labors to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at church or school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."