Drama Life Quotes

I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It’s okay if you have to leave us. It’s okay if you want to stop fighting.

Part of the hem floated loose. She spun around again—the fabric tightened like wool on a spindle. She breathed in fear. The boat was farther away. She swung her head around—so was the shore.

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love. 2. Don't Take Anything Personally Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering. 3. Don't Make Assumptions Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life. 4. Always Do Your Best Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy. You should learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more.

Her unexpected outburst rocked Flaminius to his core. Suddenly, she didn't seem so angelic. Her face twisted with rage; veins in her neck throbbed with fury in a scene all too familiar. Her reaction switched him off to her instantly as all his worst fears came to life.

You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.

Free yourself from the complexities and drama of your life. Simplify. Look within. Within ourselves we all have the gifts and talents we need to fulfill the purpose we've been blessed with.

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant.

Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.

Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour.

Lilly says I have an overactive imagination and a pathological need to invent drama in my life.

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

My Aspasia. With her, he’d discovered the sweetness in life . . . and she might like to know that. He’d tell her sometime. But he knew he’d given this lovely woman what she’d wanted most, their son’s name. He leaned over to the child. “So, you’re Little Pericles.

If you walked away from a toxic, negative, abusive, one-sided, dead-end low vibrational relationship or friendship — you won.

It is necessary, and even vital, to set standards for your life and the people you allow in it.

Your complaints, your drama, your victim mentality, your whining, your blaming, and all of your excuses have NEVER gotten you even a single step closer to your goals or dreams. Let go of your nonsense. Let go of the delusion that you DESERVE better and go EARN it! Today is a new day!

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn't drama.

Life was better than he expected with his new Italian family inheritance, and it felt good to take a deep breath without fear of someone attacking him or his family.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

How would your life be different if…You stopped validating your victim mentality? Let today be the day…You shake off your self-defeating drama and embrace your innate ability to recover and achieve.

If there's not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

I cannot help but wonder if any parents ever actually schedule in adolescent drama on their day planners. Looks like a slow week, Sarah. I guess I can pencil in your eating disorder.

Taking on too much of other people's drama is just a poor excuse for not taking ownership and control over your own life.

Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!

He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved.

That's why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard.

How did I become President? I began by setting an example, hanging out my own dirty laundry in front of Village Earth right from the start. Every ugly little life secret became a matter of public record. Of course, that included sordid love-life details.

Listen, you might as well learn now that life’s nothin’ but a dirt sandwich and save yourself a lot of time.

Sally wiped the blood from Anderson’s mouth with her sleeve. She spoke to him, but also loud enough for all to hear. ‘Go find your son, Mr Anderson. This is our war now.

I told myself, 'All I want is a normal life'. But was that true? I wasn't so sure. Because there was a part of me that enjoyed hating school, and the drama of not going, the potential consequences whatever they were. I was intrigued by the unknown. I was even slightly thrilled that my mother was such a mess. Had I become addicted to crisis? I traced my finger along the windowsill. 'Want something normal, want something normal, want something normal', I told myself.

When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway.

The magic of purpose and of love in its purest form. Not televison love, with its glare and hollow and sequined glint; not sex and allure, all high shoes and high drama, everything both too small and in too much excess, but just love. Love like rain, like the smell of a tangerine, like a surprise found in your pocket.

To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

Half my life is an act of revision.

With one hand disturbing a colony of parasitic life forms in his uncombed hair, he yawned loudly.      ‘Morning Steve,’ Thomas said scratching his grubby face. His breath drifted across the space between them making Steve’s nose twitch involuntarily.

There comes a time in your life, when you walk away from all the drama and people who create it. You surround yourself with people who make you laugh. Forget the bad and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right, pray for the ones who do not. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living.

The greatest win is walking away and choosing not to engage in drama and toxic energy at all.

Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.

Heinrich replied, “The fact that Kramer’s radio station has  been wiped out by the British Navy in now classified information!

As she was putting her boots on Daisy threw a barb over her shoulder that struck Connie right in the middle of her chest. ‘Grow up, Connie! This place is not for faint-hearted romantics!

Von Trotha said, “The Wahehe are a tribe of about one quarter of a million people! On the 17th of August 1891, they defeated the German expedition against them which was led by Zeleski.

Everything in life is a mind game! Whenever we get swept under by life’s dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end.

The hypocrisy was too much to bear, the institution was paying over a million dollars for Mr. Hyde to perform “values training” to “protect our culture,” while they simultaneously paid $2 million a year for Dr. Porter to destroy it. It was a laughable facade, but instead I wanted to cry.

He knew what he was doing – justifying an atrocity. But in war, that’s what always happened. Your red lines – those you swore to defend at all costs when you signed up – shifted, until finally none worth fighting for remained. PTSD wasn’t just about what happened to you; it was about what you did.

You don’t have to be around long to understand the world is a frightening place, that life includes situations you have no control over, that anything can happen. Everybody needs friends and a family.

Let go of the people who dull your shine, poison your spirit, and bring you drama. Cancel your subscription to their issues.

No one knew more than he how fast life could change. He pulled a trigger and four seconds later the life of a man a thousand meters away was over.

Gino’s Pizza Boy had the look of someone who’s biggest aspiration in life was to make it out of high school after two senior years.

True to course, he didn’t know the nature of the assignment; true to course, he didn’t ask. That was probably for the best. Preparation for the Iranian hostage extraction had been difficult, and its execution life-threatening, but that was child’s play compared to what was coming.

There's much more in any given moment than we usually perceive, and that we ourselves are much more than we usually perceive. When you know that, part of you can stand outside the drama of your life.

I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, thats all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen even loveless slavery, even war or death.

Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood - all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.

Of course, Emily, of course. I know. But here in Holland, we live first, work second. We truly appreciate life and make it our highest priority to enjoy it.

To stand here and try to fix her life is just a big waste of time. People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messed cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.

It was almost 3 a.m. before Connie got into bed. Sipping cocoa in the cold daylight and listening to the silence, only punctuated by the distant barking of dogs, she began to wonder what she had done. What if she had made a disastrous mistake?

I don’t think I’ll ever forget this day,’ Connie said. ‘I want to soak up every single moment, so that I can remember it when I’m old. Remember that I…we, did this. I want to have stories to tell when I’m old. I want to have done things.

Hugh le Despencer the Elder was speaking to his son, Hugh le Despencer the Younger. He said, “Son, given that you are effeminate and lack manly qualities, I think that the way for you for you to improve your lot in life is to become the King’s Chamberlain.

It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.

To you who eat a lot of rice because you’re lonely, To you who sleep a lot because you’re bored, To you who cry a lot because you are sad, I write this down. Chew on your feelings that are cornerned like you would chew on rice. Anyway, life is something that you need to digest.

Because the beings from that planet are now circling Earth in a ship the size of a small moon, threatening to destroy all human life if we don’t cooperate.

You understand that you are being manipulated by others and you become overwhelmed by hospital bureaucracy. It feels as though you have been violated by administrators who have robbed you of your passion for helping children. That passion that drove you to become a healthcare provider is replaced with mistrust, negativity, and hopeless skepticism.

The rhythmic motion of the silent paddlers carried her, with a sense of inevitability, to her new life as she heard the Twin Otter take off behind her. There was no turning back now, and Connie gripped the sides of the canoe, her heart beating and her hands sweating.

From The Twelve Enlightenments Observe your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think it’s you is not the main protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, “My life” is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t posses life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.

And I assure you, I am perfectly sane now. Stable as a workhorse in old Ireland, my friends, with only one goal in life. To do good. Always good.  

In all the medical dramas I’d ever seen, there was always some solution, some last-minute, miraculously undiscovered remedy. Nobody ever just gave up on a patient. But it seemed like in real life, they did.

There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists." So God just leaves?" No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering." Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it." But the sparrow still falls.

Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you're not looking, without you adding to the drama.

Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn't alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edgesof her heart, she was sure of it.

Connie followed the tracks of Daisy’s skidoo, passing giant, rosy pink mountains of snow which cast long grey shadows over the ground ahead of them. The sheer vastness of this multicoloured wilderness was hard to comprehend, and Connie was aware of herself and Daisy, speeding along, mere specks in the landscape.

The Earl of Lancaster loudly spoke, “Piers Gaveston, this court finds you guilty of treason, of sodomy and sedition as well as many other crimes against God! You shall be taken to Blacklow Hill, which shall by your place of execution, and you shall be put to death by two of my Welsh soldiers! May God have mercy upon your soul!

A thin, flexible, layer of ice had already formed on the water, and the undulating movement caught the light of the setting sun, like a sparkling curtain of light billowing across the bay. Connie tried to capture the moment in her mind as the thin ice shimmered in oranges and reds as it moved between already forming pieces of thicker ice.

You know, my young friend, I will be ninety years old next year, and life is still a constant surprise to me. We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose. Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed.

In any kind of relationship we can make the assumption that others know what we think, and we don’t have to say what we want. They are going to do what we want because they know us so well. If they don’t do what we want, what we assume they should do, we feel hurt and think, “How could you do that? You should know.” Again, we make the assumption that the other person knows what we want. A whole drama is created because we make this assumption and then put more assumptions on top of it.

They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?

Chase looked like a drowning man without a life preserver, and by the look in his eyes, he was going under for the third time. “I knew you would be like the waters of the South Pacific Ocean.” “I beg your pardon?” “I liken people to different bodies of water,” he quickly explained. “You what?” “Each ocean has a different personality,” he said to clarify. “The Pacific Ocean is warmer and inviting, but the color is muddied in places. The Arctic Ocean is cold and very uninviting, one might even say that it is not very appealing, but it’s full of life. Then there is the South Pacific Ocean, warm, inviting, and crystal clear. It has this purity to it. Why, the coloring of the water is some of the brightest blue I’ve ever seen in my entire life. There are even places that you can see thirty meters down.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.

There might be some lost tribe somewhere on the planet who hadn’t been exposed to the movies and books of the genre, but these eight men—Mills was the oldest at 28—had grown up in a world where reanimated dead who shambled along eating brains were part of the fabric of everyday life. Where zombie movies equated to drinking games, late night laughs, and getting laid.

Snake Street is an area I should avoid. Yet that night I was drawn there as surely as if I had an appointment.  The Snake House is shabby on the outside to hide the wealth within. Everyone knows of the wealth, but facades, like the park’s wall, must be maintained. A lantern hung from the porch eaves. A sign, written in Utte, read ‘Kinship of the Serpent’. I stared at that sign, at that porch, at the door with its twisted handle, and wondered what the people inside would do if I entered. Would they remember me? Greet me as Kin? Or drive me out and curse me for faking my death?  Worse, would they expect me to redon the life I’ve shed? Staring at that sign, I pissed in the street like the Mearan savage I’ve become. As I started to leave, I saw a woman sitting in the gutter. Her lamp attracted me. A memsa’s lamp, three tiny flames to signify the Holy Trinity of Faith, Purity, and Knowledge.  The woman wasn’t a memsa. Her young face was bruised and a gash on her throat had bloodied her clothing. Had she not been calmly assessing me, I would have believed the wound to be mortal. I offered her a copper.  She refused, “I take naught for naught,” and began to remove trinkets from a cloth bag, displaying them for sale. Her Utte accent had been enough to earn my coin. But to assuage her pride I commented on each of her worthless treasures, fighting the urge to speak Utte. (I spoke Universal with the accent of an upper class Mearan though I wondered if she had seen me wetting the cobblestones like a shameless commoner.) After she had arranged her wares, she looked up at me. “What do you desire, O Noble Born?” I laughed, certain now that she had seen my act in front of the Snake House and, letting my accent match the coarseness of my dress, I again offered the copper.  “Nay, Noble One. You must choose.” She lifted a strand of red beads. “These to adorn your lady’s bosom?”             I shook my head. I wanted her lamp. But to steal the light from this woman ... I couldn’t ask for it. She reached into her bag once more and withdrew a book, leather-bound, the pages gilded on the edges. “Be this worthy of desire, Noble Born?”  I stood stunned a moment, then touched the crescent stamped into the leather and asked if she’d stolen the book. She denied it. I’ve had the Training; she spoke truth. Yet how could she have come by a book bearing the Royal Seal of the Haesyl Line? I opened it. The pages were blank. “Take it,” she urged. “Record your deeds for study. Lo, the steps of your life mark the journey of your soul.”   I told her I couldn’t afford the book, but she smiled as if poverty were a blessing and said, “The price be one copper. Tis a wee price for salvation, Noble One.”   So I bought this journal. I hide it under my mattress. When I lie awake at night, I feel the journal beneath my back and think of the woman who sold it to me. Damn her. She plagues my soul. I promised to return the next night, but I didn’t. I promised to record my deeds. But I can’t. The price is too high.

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

Understand: people judge you by appearances, the image you project through your actions, words, and style. If you do not take control of this process, then people will see and define you the way they want to, often to your detriment. You might think that being consistent with this image will make others respect and trust you, but in fact it is the opposite—over time you seem predictable and weak. Consistency is an illusion anyway—each passing day brings changes within you. You must not be afraid to express these evolutions. The powerful learn early in life that they have the freedom to mold their image, fitting the needs and moods of the moment. In this way, they keep others off balance and maintain an air of mystery. You must follow this path and find great pleasure in reinventing yourself, as if you were the author writing your own drama

I want you—" "Then fucking have me." "—but I don't want this." Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room. "What does that even mean?" "I don't want it!" Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. "Don't you bloody see? I'm not like you. I can't afford to be reckless. I don't have a family who will support me. I don't go about shoving who I am in everyone's faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I'm allowed, all right, and it doesn't make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don't get to come here and call me a coward for it.

It never ceases to amaze me the precious time we spend chasing the squirrels around our brains, playing out our dramas, worrying about unwanted facial hair, seeking adoration, justifying our actions, complaining about slow Internet connections, dissecting the lives of idiots, when we are sitting in the middle of a full-blown miracle that is happening right here, right now. We're on a planet that somehow knows how to rotate on its axis and follow a defined path while it hurtles through space! Our hearts beat! We can see! We have love, laughter, language, living rooms, computers, compassion, cars, fire, fingernails, flowers, music, medicine, mountains, muffins!

Day in, day out, you peel the layers back for me. Smart mouth, funny, sweet, wild in bed. Chattin' with bikers like they were insurance brokers. Holdin' my girl's hand, givin' her strength when her Mom's bein' a bitch. Keepin' your chin up when your people show in the middle of a full blown drama. But so fuckin' vulnerable, you're scared shitless of livin' life." "You don't know me, Tack." His head came up and his eyes pierced mine. "I know you, Tyra." "You don't." "Life's a roller coaster. Best damn ride in the park. You don't close your eyes, hold on and wait for it to be over, babe. You keep your eyes open, lift your hands straight up in the air and enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts.

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening.

believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it. I don’t want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day. I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grab on to and extend to one another. That’s the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don’t even see it, because I’m too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I am about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting. The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it. I believe that if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within us and between us, dreams and stories and memories spilling over. The nuances and shades and secrets and intimations of love and friendship and marriage an parenting are action-packed and multicolored, if you know where to look. Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural. You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.

Tea is an act complete in its simplicity. When I drink tea, there is only me and the tea. The rest of the world dissolves. There are no worries about the future. No dwelling on past mistakes. Tea is simple: loose-leaf tea, hot pure water, a cup. I inhale the scent, tiny delicate pieces of the tea floating above the cup. I drink the tea, the essence of the leaves becoming a part of me. I am informed by the tea, changed. This is the act of life, in one pure moment, and in this act the truth of the world suddenly becomes revealed: all the complexity, pain, drama of life is a pretense, invented in our minds for no good purpose. There is only the tea, and me, converging.

Mr Churchill caught the end of one of the long ribbons from her bonnet, which were flying madly in the strong breeze. He toyed with it for a long while, then looked up into her eyes. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” he asked. “No, I don’t suppose I do,” Jane answered. Her heart started beating harder. That was a lie. Maybe her breath was catching in her throat because she was lying: she fell in love with him the moment she saw him, rescuing the poor store clerk. Or maybe it was because he was standing so close to her, just on the other end of her bonnet ribbon. She felt her cheeks growing warm, and tried to talk herself out of blushing. He was not standing any closer to her than when they danced together, or sat on the same bench at the pianoforte. Why should it fluster her that he was wrapping the end of her bonnet ribbon around his fingers like that?

The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting sado-machistic affair with your own image?

Since that night a couple of weeks ago when Valerie had stayed with him, they had barely separated. The stories of Rabbit’s Revenge droned on and on talking of the impending doom of the planet and the international scientific community’s various attempts to determine a course of action to prevent it. For Jeremy, however, each passing day left him feeling more and more certain he was missing something. It was just a nagging little sensation that lingered like an itch on the back of his neck. With Valerie now firmly implanted in his life, it was a wonder he even thought about it at all, but during his quiet moments and when he awoke in the mornings or even during his more intense workouts, the sensation crept back up on him. It seemed to center around the experience of having his life pass before his eyes, but beyond that it was just nebulous. And annoying.

Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life--to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life. And extremes--whether of dullness or fury--successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies--unconscious strategies--to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too--sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life. It takes courage to feel the feeling--and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable? I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.

She's locked up with a spinning wheel She can't recall what it was like to feel She says, "This room's gonna be my grave And there's no one who can save me," She sits down to her colored thread She knows lovers waking up in their beds She says, "How long can I live this way Is there someone I can pay to let me go 'Cause I'm half sick of shadows I want to see the sky Everyone else can watch as the sun goes down So why can't I And it's raining And the stars are falling from the sky And the wind And the wind I know it's cold I've been waiting For the day I will surely die And it's here And it's here for I've been told That I'll die before I'm old And the wind I know it's cold... She looks up to the mirrored glass She sees a horse and rider pass She says, "This man's gonna be my death 'Cause he's all I ever wanted in my life And I know he doesn't know my name And that all the girls are all the same to him But still I've got to get out of this place 'Cause I don't think I can face another night Where I'm half sick of shadows And I can't see the sky Everyone else can watch as the tide comes in So why can't I But there's willow trees And little breezes, waves, and walls, and flowers And there's moonlight every single night As I'm locked in these towers So I'll meet my death But with my last breath I'll sing to him I love And he'll see my face in another place," And with that the glass above Her cracked into a million bits And she cried out, "So the story fits But then I could have guessed it all along 'Cause now some drama queen is gonna write a song for me," She went down to her little boat And she broke the chains and began to float away And as the blood froze in her veins she said, "Well then that explains a thing or two 'Cause I know I'm the cursed one I know I'm meant to die Everyone else can watch as their dreams untie So why can't I

Satisfied, Sundae trotted to a bush near the lake, dug vigorously for some seconds and pulled out a bone deliciously covered in mud and bits of vegetation. She took her prize to a still-sunny patch of grass and began to gnaw at it. Two magpies, their greyish necks identifying them as juveniles, landed on a nearby branch. Sundae paused, eyes flicking up to stare at the birds, then returned to attend to the bone. One of the magpies swooped down and landed on the lawn a couple of metres away from the dog. Sunny’s top lip trembled up in the prelude of a snarl. The magpie approached the dog. Sundae’s body tensed, lip furling up further, eyes focused on the agitator. The magpie inched closer. When it was half a metre away, Sundae launched. The bird flew back to the branch next to its companion. Then both birds threw their heads back and let out a rollicking call; it sounded like laughter. Rumbling a growl, Sundae returned to her bone, casting baleful glares at the birds as she gnawed. Saskia and Tania chuckled. “For all of my life, I have watched the magpies and dogs of Woodgrove play this game,” Tania said. “And every time I see it, I have to laugh.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

A non-religious man today ignores what he considers sacred but, in the structure of his consciousness, could not be without the ideas of being and the meaningful. He may consider these purely human aspects of the structure of consciousness. What we see today is that man considers himself to have nothing sacred, no god; but still his life has a meaning, because without it he could not live; he would be in chaos. He looks for being and does not immediately call it being, but meaning or goals; he behaves in his existence as if he had a kind of center. He is going somewhere, he is doing something. We do not see anything religious here; we just see man behaving as a human being. But as a historian of religion, I am not certain that there is nothing religious here… I cannot consider exclusively what that man tells me when he consciously says, ‘I don’t believe in God; I believe in history,’ and so on. For example, I do not think that Jean-Paul Sartre gives all of himself in his philosophy, because I know that Sartre sleeps and dreams and likes music and goes to the theater. And in the theater he gets into a temporal dimension in which he no longer lives his ‘moment historique.’ There he lives in quite another dimension. We live in another dimension when we listen to Bach. Another experience of time is given in drama. We spend two hours at a play, and yet the time represented in the play occupies years and years. We also dream. This is the complete man. I cannot cut this complete man off and believe someone immediately when he consciously says that he is not a religious man. I think that unconsciously, this man still behaves as the ‘homo religiosus,’ has some source of value and meaning, some images, is nourished by his unconscious, by the imaginary universe of the poems he reads, of the plays he sees; he still lives in different universes. I cannot limit his universe to that purely self-conscious, rationalistic universe which he pretends to inhabit, since that universe is not human.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime. There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love: To Gaylene deceased To Ray deceased To Francy permanent psychosis To Kathy permanent brain damage To Jim deceased To Val massive permanent brain damage To Nancy permanent psychosis To Joanne permanent brain damage To Maren deceased To Nick deceased To Terry deceased To Dennis deceased To Phil permanent pancreatic damage To Sue permanent vascular damage To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage . . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.