He shook his head, just looking at me. - "What?" I asked.- "Nothing" he said.- "Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I`m not beau-"- "You are like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman."- "Never seen it."- "Really?" he asked. "Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can`t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It`s your autobiography, so far as I can tell."His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn`t even know that guys could turn me on - not, like, in real life.
It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
Life has a meaning but do not set out to find out. Just live it out.
This life is not perfect, live it to the full, it's all we have
Be the girl you want your daughter to be. Be the girl you want your son to date. Be classy, be smart, be real, but most importantly be nice.
From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately.
What is life but an ongoing war?
Life is a dream. We wake up when we die
FORKED BRANCHESWe grew up on the same street,You and me.We went to the same schools,Rode the same bus,Had the same friends,And even shared spaghettiWith each other's families.And though our roots belong toThe same tree,Our branches have grownIn different directions.Our tree,Now resembles a thousandOther treesIn a sea of a trillionOther treesWith parallel destiniesAnd similar dreams.You cannot envy the branchThat grows biggerFrom the same seed,And you cannotBlame it on the sun's direction.But you still compare us,As if we're still those twoKids at the parkSlurping down slushies andEating ice cream. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)
The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.
Alice started to cry. It came with no sound, no shuddering, no childlike hysterics, just a soul-deep release that turned into moisture and dripped down her puffy pink cheeks. She touched her tears, frowning. Then she looked up at Julia and whimpered two words before she fell asleep. ‘Real hurts.’
But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child.
We deal with so many nightmares on a regular basis. When I’m watching a horror movie, there’s a pattern, a sense of control in them. I’m just an observer, not having to deal with any of the repercussions. It’s a nice dream to think monsters play by the rules, that they’ve got a pattern you can unlock and follow. Real life’s messy, and the chaos leaves you devastated in the wake.
Reality and fantasy are not two separate spheres but one whole. They are like a world's atmosphere―reality behaving as a low front, fantasy a high front. Each remains somewhat distinguishable and yet they swirl and join, affecting and manipulating the other. One cannot perceive where reality ends and fantasy begins, but life would grow stagnant and die without the influence of both.
If your love for another person doesn’t include loving yourself then your love is incomplete.
Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.
A lot of churches and church people give God a bad name. There's a scripture in the Bible that says the traditions of men make the word of God of none effect. That's so true. All our religious rituals dilute the reality of who God is and make a lot of people not want to have anything to do with Him. I had to learn to reject 'Churchianity' and not Christianity.
Family is the only why of life
It was Valentine's Day and I had spent the day in bed with my life partner, Ketel One. The two of us watched a romance movie marathon on TBS Superstation that made me wonder how people who write romantic comedies can sleep at night. At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall all-the-time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer. Then, within the two hour time frame of the movie, the couple meet, fall in love, fall out of love, break up, and then just before the end of the movie, they happen to bump into each other by "coincidence" somewhere absolutely absurd, like by the river. This never happens in real life. The last time I bumped into an ex-boyfriend was at three o'clock in the morning at Rite Aid. I was ringing up Gas-X and corn removers.
In short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering, to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences. Reality irritated him, frightened him, kept him in continual agitation, and, perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what had never existed; and even the classical languages which he taught were in reality for him goloshes and umbrellas in which he sheltered himself from real life.
True love makes you sleep and dream. But loud reality wakes you up
Life's a book filled on pages Just awaiting to be written.Some don't open it for ages,Maybe afraid of being bitten.
Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...
Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.
Drift me away along with the dust traveling to infinity.To another world where it feels more at home.To another world where I don’t feel alone.Trapped in the angst of my soul.Not being embraced as a whole.A state of nothingness creeps upon me.Disappearing in the darkness of the shadows.How it has clocked my life.Because that is the only place where I find peace.I call it nyctophilia.And what am I when the day turns into the night,listening to the nocturnal and the howling wind?My soul leaving my body,To be at rest.Tears strain down my cheeks,Enough for my lungs to fight for air in the peaks.The atmosphere seems to be held in place by a certain silence, waiting for a sign to move.Even the earth forgot its behoove.Taken over by this silence that I yet do not understand myself.It seems that things don’t have a meaning,At least not anymore.The demons and darkness have taken over.Making me believe that it knows better.These demons can’t be seen,But they’re far from imaginary.They live inside my mind.Their evilness prevails,About to end the fight.Then I stop and think:This is a melancholy I’ll fight one more night.
Don’t complain against life, it may hear you and double your suffering
You will never really think hard about your life until your oxygen mask is taken away from you when you are at the bed of the ocean. At that exact moment, your true self will be revealed. You will really know if you are a believer or an atheist, whether you really love life or hate it as you usually say. All your claims will be tested
We don't know where we come from and where we go, we fill the missing links with whatever our imaginations can provide us
Then nothing became something, and I was born, and I wrought great havoc in the world in the time allotted to me, and I returned to nothingness
Water in, water out until there is no water to run and the riverbed runs dry. That's life
Life has no map; it's made of random events, always caused by something beyond your control.
Life is just a dream, to some it's a sweet dream, to others, a nightmare. But whatever it is, it's always short and dissipates quickly.
We live like sheep in line waiting to be slaughtered in a slaughterhouse. We eat and laugh and fight as we see those in front of us fall to the knife
A small event as tiny as a drop of a pin can change the direction of your entire life
When you finally understand the meaning of life, you come to the conclusion it has none after all
Most of our waking life is make believe. If there was a way to record every dream that crosses our minds, the true nature of humans would be laid bare
Do you know why we show respect to life when it shows none to us? Family is the answer
If you still have fear, you love life
Nature has endowed us with some measure of insanity to cope with the realities of daily life
Life is a war. Guerrilla warfare, the strategy
Life is existence with meaning
Some people start to live when they die
Sometimes the rope seems the only option when at the bottom of the pit. Climb it to safety.
What's the use of life without health? It's like living dead
Real life is messy and hard and never turns out like I’ve imagined. Usually it’s better. So, I try not to dream but rather to pray. If there is one thing I know, it’s that I have no clue what I want. I’m fickle. I’m picky. And I’m scared of a lot of things. Especially commitment.
Though sincerity is a word which rings its meaning in the mind when it is mentioned, its real meaning in real sense is neither the meaning we imagine nor the spoken word but in action. Yes, it is action that determines what sincere means in reality. Real action that stands the test of time does not only give a true meaning to the word sincere in our mind and mind’s eye but it also creates a real picture of who a real sincere person is in our minds and mind’s eye.
Tiffany got up early and lit the fires. When her mother came down, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, very hard.“Er…aren’t you supposed to do that sort of thing by magic, dear?” said her mother, who’d never really got the hang of what witchcraft was all about.“No, Mum, I’m supposed not to,” said Tiffany, still scrubbing.“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.
So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
After I binged last night -or was it tonight - I was convinced yet again that there were people coming to get me. It was more than just shadows and voices, more than just fantasies....it was real, and I was scared to my core.My bones were shaking...m heart was pounding...I thought I was going to explode. I'm glad I have you to talk to, to write this down. I tried to keep it all together, but then I gave in to the manes and became one with my insanity.
I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along—and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it.
Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene - colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.
Story telling or teachable moments, provides us with a vast reference base of real life antidotes for possible future problems. They not only entertain and give us a resource of proven solutions, but they also help shape and mold our character. Therefore, when we don’t take our time to communicate with our kids, then we rob them of critical life lessons that we and our forefathers learn the hard way - lessons that they would needlessly have to learn through trial and error themselves.
Have you everhad so much to saythat your mouth closed up tightstruggling to harnessthe nuclear forcecoalescing within your words?Have you everhad so many thoughtschurning inside you that you didn’tdare let them escapein case they blew you wide open?Have you everbeen so angry that youcouldn’t look in the mirrorfor fear of finding the face of evilglaring back at you?
We know how to dream beautifully! And in our dreams we are always extraordinarily active! We cross oceans, found colonies, introduce ideal governments, and die as Kings or at least Presidents of Republics! In actual life, however, we groan, we are miserable, and we greatly resent being obliged to bother about going to the Bank, in order to receive the interest of the capital acquired for us by our more energetic ancestors.
As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.
Why d’you think she did it?”I told him I had no idea. He seemed disappointed that I shouldn’t know.“A broken heart,” I suggested.“Do people suffer so much?”“For love? Oh, I imagine so.”“To drown herself?”“Why does that astonish you? Dido threw herself on the flames.”“In legend.”“And real life’s different?” I asked.
During certain periods of our lives, we may listen to a particular song that touches our hearts so much that we end up repeating the song for the umpteenth time. My question is, how would you know the next song will also touch your heart if you don't allow the playlist to flow? This happens to us in real life; sometimes we get too comfortable with one thing such that we don't allow for other experiences and opportunities.
Movies were movies, whether they were old or new. They always captivated me, pulled me into worlds where anything was possible. Worlds where there were adventures and surprises, and life was never dull. The only thing I didn't like about movies was when the credits rolled and returned me to real life.
I'll stand next to that fountain and wait until the Official find me. And when she does and asks me what I'm doing, I'll tell her and everyone else that I know: t hey are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing. And I'll tell her that I don't want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.