โ
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
It's a funny thing... but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
A mountain keeps an echo deep inside. That's how I hold your voice.
โ
โ
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
โ
I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
Iโll meet you there.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
All good things in life are fragile and easily lost
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Jโaurais dรป รชtre plus gentilleโI should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
The rope that pulls you from the flood can become a noose around your neck.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Kabul is... a thousand tragedies per square mile.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
They tell me I must wade into waters, where I will soon drown. Before I march in, I leave this on the shore for you. I pray you find it, sister, so you will know what was in my heart as I went under.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
For courage, there must be something at stake. I come here with nothing to lose.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
The finger cut, to save the hand.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree.
I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
But then it passed, as all things do.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I've read that if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
At last, she makes her choice. She turns around, drops her head, and walks toward a horizon she cannot see. After that, she does not look back anymore. She knows that if she does, she will weaken.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Gone.
Vanished.
Nothing left.
Nothing said.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
People learned to live with the
most unimaginable things.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
This world is like a mountain.
Your echo depends on you.
If you scream good things,
the world will give it back.
If you scream bad things,
the world will give it back.
Even if someone says badly about you,
speak well about him.
Change your heart to change the world.
โ
โ
Shams Tabrizi
โ
She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it's that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it's going to work. It's astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
It was you Nabi.
It was always you.
Didn't you know?
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
The King beneath the mountains,
The King of carven stone,
The lord of silver fountains
Shall come into his own!
His crown shall be upholden,
His harp shall be restrung,
His halls shall echo golden
To songs of yore re-sung.
The woods shall wave on mountains.
And grass beneath the sun;
His wealth shall flow in fountains
And the rivers golden run.
The streams shall run in gladness,
The lakes shall shine and burn,
And sorrow fail and sadness
At the Mountain-kingโs return!
โ
โ
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (The Lord of the Rings, #0))
โ
I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
What good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
In my experience, men who understand women seem to rarely want to have anything to do with them.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
All my life, she gave to me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
โ
โ
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
โ
She was an extraordinary woman, and I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word 'senseless' springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It's what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than i did the sun for shining on me.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Must have been quite the culture shock, going there.โ
โYes it was.โ Idris doesnโt say that the real culture shock has been in coming back.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to become a parent.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
You say their stories, it is gift they give you.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
People in the countryside carry a sense of dignity. They wear it, don't they? Like a badge? I'm being genuine.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
It was madness.Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
She considers for a minute before saying, "I should have been more kind. That is something a person will never regret. You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person. You will never think that. I should have been more kind.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.
โ
โ
Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2))
โ
Tonight I miss you like the sky misses his moon; a delicate epiphany growing on grass. I serenade the breeze into dancing a cha cha cha; the mountains echo in the background. September sky never looked more charming; or the sublime petals of the rose looked so graceful.
โ
โ
Avijeet Das
โ
I am not delicate.
I am skinny dipping at 2am;
I am dancing naked under the full moon and playing in the mud.
I am the reverberating echoes of a curse word ricocheting off the steeply sloping mountain you thought I couldnโt climb;
I am bare skin in the deepest depths of winter; I am the song of courage, and the melody of freedom you long to sing.
I am a fearless mother.
I am a passionate lover; a devoted friend.
I am the healer, the witch, the nurturing of your wounds.
I am the heat of a wildfire, the rage of a storm.
I am strong.
Delicate things are pretty-cute, even.
But I am not delicate.
I am wild, fierce and unpredictable.
I am breathtaking.
I am beautiful.
I am sacred.
โ
โ
Brooke Hampton
โ
Soon, he would become an adult. And when he did, there would be not going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about being a war hero: one you became one, you died one.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
A life lived from the back seat, observed as it blured by. An indifferent life.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
All my life, I [Pari] have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away. โNothing like life, in other words,โ he said. โThere, itโs questions with either no answers or messy ones.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, its boundless brutality.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Echoes through the ancient mountains around us and the Greek philosophers who waxed lyrical about true love and soulmates roll in their graves as I try for the billionth time to sever myself from mine.
โ
โ
Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks (Magnolia Parks Universe, #1))
โ
You will never say to yourself when you are old, Ah, I wish I was not good to that person.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
There is something humbling about knowing that an entity capable of moving mountains and reshaping continents still takes the time to tend to the smallest patch of dirt. Little things matter. Footsteps matter.
โ
โ
William Ritter (Ghostly Echoes (Jackaby, #3))
โ
He was a visionary or a fool I have found the line perilously thin myself
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
I used to picture us as two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
ุฅู ูุดุฑ ุฃุนู
ุงูู ุนูู ููุญุฉ ุฅุนูุงูุงุช ูู ุฃู
ุฑ ุฎุงุทูุก ุ ุฅููุง ุฃู
ูุฑ ูููู
ุจูุง ุงูุฅูุณุงู ุจุตู
ุช ุ ุจูุฑุงู
ุฉ .. ุงูุฅุญุณุงู ูุงูุนูู ุชูููุน ุงูุดููุงุช ูููุงุณ ุนูู ุงูู
ูุฃ !
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
As I exclaimed 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' a voice- I cannot tell whence the voice came, but I know whose voice it was- replied, 'I am coming: wait for me;' and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the words- 'Where are you?' "I'll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture these words opened to my mind: yet it is difficult to express what I want to express. Ferndean is buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls dull, and dies unreverberating. 'Where are you?' seemed spoken amongst mountains; for I heard a hill-sent echo repeat the words. Cooler and fresher at the moment the gale seemed to visit my brow: I could have deemed that in some wild, lone scene, I and Jane were meeting. In spirit, I believe we must have met. You no doubt were, at that hour, in unconscious sleep, Jane: perhaps your soul wandered from its cell to comfort mine; for those were your accents- as certain as I live- they were yours!" Reader, it was on Monday night- near midnight- that I too had received the mysterious summons: those were the very words by which I replied to it.
(Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre)
โ
โ
Charlotte Brontรซ (Jane Eyre)
โ
I may not agree with all or even most of the tribal traditions, but it seems ti me that, out there, people live more authentic lives. They have a sturdiness about them. A refreshing humility. Hospitality too. And resilience. A sense of pride.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Dr. Bashiri, if I ever want to put a curse in someone, I say, 'May God give you a restaurant.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Who rebels with mathematics?
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answer may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
The world is a mountain. Whatever you say, it will echo it back to you. Don't say, "I sang nicely and the mountain echoed an ugly voice!" That is not possible. The human intellect is a place where hesitation and uncertainty take root. There is no way to overcome this hesitation except by falling in love.
โ
โ
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
โ
I've crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they're all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a little bit of charm-- Or a lot -- and that can fool you. But really they're all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven't been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it's a mistake to give it to them. They can't accept it. They can't accept the very thing they're needing. They end up hating you for it. And it never ends because they can't hate you enough. It never ends-- the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all. My first husband was like that.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
You are lucky."
"How so?"
"To know where you came from."
I guess I never gave it much thought.:
"Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.
โ
โ
H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines (Allan Quatermain, #1))
โ
What was I supposed to be, growing in your womb -- assuming it was even in our womb that I was conceived? A seed of hope? A ticket purchased to ferry you from the dark? A patch for that hole you carried in your heart? If so, then I wasn't enough. I wasn't nearly enough. I was no balm to your pain, only another dead end, another burden, and you must have seen that early on. You must have realized it. But what could you do? You couldn't go down to the pawnshop and sell me.
โ
โ
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
โ
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important
โ
โ
W.S. Merwin
โ
The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor. Glanton sat his horse and looked long out upon this scene. Sparse on the mesa the dry weeds lashed in the wind like the earth's long echo of lance and spear in old encounters forever unrecorded. All the sky seemed troubled and night came quickly over the evening land and small gray birds flew crying softly after the fled sun. He chucked up the horse. He passed and so passed all into the problematical destruction of darkness.
โ
โ
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
โ
And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! Then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come, And plink! A silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes:โ they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is chamber after chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stair beyond stair; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountainsโ heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helmโs Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them.
โ
โ
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)
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Call themselves?" asked Yama. "You are wrong, Sam, Godhood is more than a name. It is a condition of being. One does not achieve it merely by being immortal, for even the lowliest laborer in the fields may achieve continuity of existence. Is it then the conditioning of an Aspect? No. Any competent hypnotist can play games with the self-image. Is it the raising up of an Attribute? Of course not. I can design machines more powerful and more accurate than any faculty a man may cultivate. Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe, so that those who look upon you know this without hearing your name spoken. Some ancient poet said that the world is full of echoes and correspondences. Another wrote a long poem of an inferno, wherein each man suffered a torture which coincided in nature with those forces which had ruled his life. Being a god is being able to recognize within one's self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one's ruling passions. Those who look upon gods then say, without even knowing their names, 'He is Fire. She is Dance. He is Destruction. She is Love.' So, to reply to your statement, they do not call themselves gods. Everyone else does, though, everyone who beholds them."
"So they play that on their fascist banjos, eh?"
"You choose the wrong adjective."
"You've already used up all the others.
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Roger Zelazny (Lord of Light)
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And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls โฆ falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heartโs condition. And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder. And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.
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Mervyn Peake (The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy)
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My son, you are just an infant now, but on that day when the world disrobes of its alluring cloak, it is then that I pray this letter is in your hands.
Listen closely, my dear child, for I am more than that old man in the dusty portrait beside your bed. I was once a little boy in my motherโs arms and a babbling toddler on my father's lap.
I played till the sun would set and climbed trees with ease and skill. Then I grew into a fine young man with shoulders broad and strong. My bones were firm and my limbs were straight; my hair was blacker than a raven's beak. I had a spring in my step and a lion's roar. I travelled the world, found love and married. Then off to war I bled in battle and danced with death.
But today, vigor and grace have forsaken me and left me crippled.
Listen closely, then, as I have lived not only all the years you have existed, but another forty more of my own.
My son, We take this world for a permanent place; we assume our gains and triumphs will always be; that all that is dear to us will last forever.
But my child, time is a patient hunter and a treacherous thief: it robs us of our loved ones and snatches up our glory. It crumbles mountains and turns stone to sand. So who are we to impede its path?
No, everything and everyone we love will vanish, one day.
So take time to appreciate the wee hours and seconds you have in this world. Your life is nothing but a sum of days so why take any day for granted? Don't despise evil people, they are here for a reason, too, for just as the gift salt offers to food, so do the worst of men allow us to savor the sweet, hidden flavor of true friendship.
Dear boy, treat your elders with respect and shower them with gratitude; they are the keepers of hidden treasures and bridges to our past. Give meaning to your every goodbye and hold on to that parting embrace just a moment longer--you never know if it will be your last.
Beware the temptation of riches and fame for both will abandon you faster than our own shadow deserts us at the approach of the setting sun. Cultivate seeds of knowledge in your soul and reap the harvest of good character.
Above all, know why you have been placed on this floating blue sphere, swimming through space, for there is nothing more worthy of regret than a life lived void of this knowing.
My son, dark days are upon you. This world will not leave you with tears unshed. It will squeeze you in its talons and lift you high, then drop you to plummet and shatter to bits . But when you lay there in pieces scattered and broken, gather yourself together and be whole once more. That is the secret of those who know.
So let not my graying hairs and wrinkled skin deceive you that I do not understand this modern world. My life was filled with a thousand sacrifices that only I will ever know and a hundred gulps of poison I drank to be the father I wanted you to have.
But, alas, such is the nature of this life that we will never truly know the struggles of our parents--not until that time arrives when a little hand--resembling our own--gently clutches our finger from its crib.
My dear child, I fear that day when you will call hopelessly upon my lifeless corpse and no response shall come from me. I will be of no use to you then but I hope these words I leave behind will echo in your ears that day when I am no more. This life is but a blink in the eye of time, so cherish each moment dearly, my son.
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Shakieb Orgunwall
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The Jumblies
I
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, 'You'll all be drowned!'
They called aloud, 'Our Sieve ain't big,
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!'
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
II
They sailed away in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they sailed so fast,
With only a beautiful pea-green veil
Tied with a riband by way of a sail,
To a small tobacco-pipe mast;
And every one said, who saw them go,
'O won't they be soon upset, you know!
For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long,
And happen what may, it's extremely wrong
In a Sieve to sail so fast!'
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
III
The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, 'How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!'
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
IV
And all night long they sailed away;
And when the sun went down,
They whistled and warbled a moony song
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,
In the shade of the mountains brown.
'O Timballo! How happy we are,
When we live in a Sieve and a crockery-jar,
And all night long in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail,
In the shade of the mountains brown!'
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
V
They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees,
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
VI
And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, 'How tall they've grown!
For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore!'
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;
And every one said, 'If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,---
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!'
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
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Edward Lear