As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.” — Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance (Kodansha USA Inc; 1st edition, January 1, 1994)
You have to pay attention, take the world in before you can accurately let it out again. There’s something to be said for silence, exile and cunning. – Gregory Galloway, As Simple As Snow (Putnam Adult; 1St Edition, March 3, 2005)
It just seems that the whole time you’re living this life, you’re thinking about a different one instead. — Inga Ābele, High Tide (Open Letter Books, 2013)
I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning. — Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red (Everyman’s Library; Reprint edition, November 2, 2010) Originally published January 1, 1998.
It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. — Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles (September 1, 1901)
The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already: ruby light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead roses. – G.K. Chesterton, from “The Flying Stars,” The Complete Father Brown (Penguin, 1981)
Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment. ― Harlan Ellison
Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? … The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. — Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993)
If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today. — John Fowles, The Magus. (Back Bay Books; Revised edition January 4, 2001) Originally published… Continue reading John Fowles
There’s a terribly cold emptiness under my heart; — Inga Ābele, High Tide (Open Letter September 26, 2013) Originally published January 1st 2008.
The Vale of Soul-Making 