Intangible Things Quotes

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Babcock fidgeted with one of his cufflinks while staring down the remaining brokers in his office. He then delivered something akin to a pep talk in a severe tone. "... The world depends on our services. Services that must not be impeded. We don't break our backs producing things that have no real value—food, shelter, clothes ... art. No! We're titans of finance. We move intangible things and ideas around the world on digital platforms. No one else in the world can accumulate as much wealth as we do by simply moving around one and zeros on computers.

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

Beauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it. Nor will a "pretty" face make it, for "pretty" faces are often dull and empty, and beauty is never dull and it fills all spaces.

Perfect should never be a goal. Perfect just happens if you let it.

Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong this is. When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology. It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.

You need to be flagrantly insouciant. You care way too much. And because of that you will be paralyzed for life and miss out on everything.

All things manifesting in the lower worlds exist first in the intangible rings of the upper spheres, so that creation is, in truth, the process of making tangible the intangible by extending the intangible into various vibratory rates.

Violence is so terribly fast . . . the most perverse thing about the movies is the way they portray it in slow motion, allowing it to be something sensuous . . . the viewer's lips slightly wet as the scene plays out. Violence is nothing like that. It is lightning fast, chaotic, and totally intangible.

I think there could be different versions of truth, he says. You choose your truth, and then you build your life around it.

I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child's hair, the silence of a forest, their lover's crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it's perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.

Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.

Kästner was one reason I called my book barge the Literary Apothecary,” said Perdu. “I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they are apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.

If you have survived an abuser, and you tried to make things right… If you forgave, and you struggled, and even if the expression of your grief and your anger tumbled out at times in too much rage and too many words… If you spent years hanging on to the concepts of faith, hope, and love, even after you knew in your heart that those intangibles, upon which life is formed and sustained, would fail in the end… And especially, if you stood between your children - or anyone - and him, and took the physical, emotional, and spiritual pummeling in their stead, then you are a hero.

I’d never been a big fan of that saying, “Everything happens for a reason,” but maybe, sometimes, every once in a while, things coalesced into a complex, intangible reason. With tattoos and piercings and bad words and unfailing loyalty topped with a temper. And in its own imperfect way, it couldn’t have been any better.

Having a resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die

Love is an intangible thing.” “That’s where you’re wrong,” Arthur said. If I can prove I’m in love with your daughter, will you give us your blessing?

She really needs to believe she's special. I admire that about her. Because you have to believe you're special before you can do anything special

Beauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it.

The cowardly belief that a person must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness. There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the non-existent horizon, and her empire is an intangible one, for her domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.

Love is an intangible thing. When you truly love, you learn that what you feel is more significant than anything that you can see. Love has more power than any weapon. It is more life giving than food or medicine. Sometimes love lasts forever and sometimes it lasts just long enough to teach you what you need to learn.

And I learn that facing your greatest fear is liberating. You no longer have to worry about it, because it has already happened. And you have survived.

But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.

Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things...but what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells.

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is.” —D. H. Lawrence, Pansies

And I learn that facing your greatest fear is liberating. You no longer have to worry about it, because it has already happened. And you have survived. I want to face some more fears, it feels so freaking liberating. I want to just jump off the freaking Brooklyn Bridge.

I have left behind what tethered me to the lake. The sadness. The self-pity. The dark tentacles of the murky sea monster only I could see. And I have come to appreciate the ocean. How the sun and salt together can leave things weightless, easy, and smooth around the edges. Like sea glass and driftwood.

Everywhere I looked, I could see only shades of gray. Black and white were nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we tried to judge things and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, were as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We could only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we could no longer see the light.

We tend to forget that other people view us so differently from how we view ourselves. So take pride in who you are, who you love, what you love, and the intangible things you can't touch but still love.

Years from now, I will say that tonight was the night I knew that she was the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. This is about more than her body, her tanned skin, her perfect mouth. I am in love with her blood, with her smell, with intangible things that I will never hold – her laugh, her anger, her soul. She kisses me, and she has a thousand reasons to be upset with me, but tonight she is not upset. She just keeps saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you, in this life and the next and the last”.

There is such a thing as a shy extrovert. People think extroverts are all loud and mouthy, like Rebecca Forman, but that's not true. The definitions of extrovert and introvert have do with how you process the world and from where you draw your energy. I'm shy, but I process my world by talking about it. Which makes me an extrovert. But I don't talk about it with just anyone. I have to talk about it with Zoe.

There is no stronger bond than the one that gets you through childhood.

Nobody warns you that life continues to be complicated after you’ve Done the Right Thing. That there is no reward, beyond some intangible sense of moral fortitude.

It is strange that the most intangible thing is the most adhesive.

What lies inside a cage of flames? The truth, the heart, but burned up before you can see it. Only traces remain in the ashes, a pattern you guess at or invent, an intangible thing that might leave a mark, but could just as easily blow away.

Why is some music so much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in music, is expressive–expressive to some strange subconscious regions of our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical meaning IS dependent on intangible links from symbols to things in the world–those 'things', in this case, being secret software structures in our minds.

You could keep someone physically alive with machines, but that didn't qualify as fully alive. If they were missing that spark, that intangible thing that made people who they were, then they weren't really with this world anymore. They had moved on, despite the desperate pumping and whirring of modern medicine's machinery.

How can anyone grow up with parents and still believe that love conquers all? What teenager on the planet has parents who are still in love?

Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering.

When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.

You are the only girl worth pursuing. And that's why no one pursues you." -Danny

None of them are wholesome. There are straight men, and there are gay men, but there are no wholesome men.

I am a freshwater girl. I live on the lake, and in New Jersey, that's rare. The girls on the other side of town have swimming pools, and the girls in the south have the seashore. Other girls are dry, breezy, salty, and bleached. I, on the other hand, am dark, grounded, heavy, and wet. Fed by springs, tangled in soft fernlike seaweed, I am closer to the earth. Saturated to the bone. I know it, and so do the freshwater boys, who prefer the taste of salt.

Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check. And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality.

Seekers inevitably want to get a better handle on life; we want to figure things out. We know intuitively that the events of our lives are not always arbitrary. We feel connected, however intangibly. We know that it is in our higher self-interest to unravel the mysteries in our own lives. There must be a higher purpose and greater meaning. As we become more and more spiritually evolved, we become more determined to find wisdom and reach a deeper understanding of our lives and our paths.

You paint from your subject, not what you see…I rarely paint anything I don’t know very well. It was surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is based on the idea of approximation. If a man tells you he knows a thing exactly, then you can be safe in inferring that you are speaking to an inexact man. —Bertrand Russell

How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions

So maybe God is orgasm.

It’s the intangibles that impress her the most. Sex, for Maggie, is in the way he noticed the cut on her arm from the rock. That he was upset because she hadn’t cried out, because she had kept the pain to herself. The way he peeled off his boxer briefs. The foreign softness of certain patches of skin. It would be these things that she would remember for years to come.

Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. It therefore has no reality check.

There is no need to be troubled by things that have not yet happened. Think only about what is happening right now. Almost all anxieties are intangible. They are the invention of your own

[A]s you will come to see, everything in life comes at a price. Nothing is free, not a single thing, tangible or intangible. There is an equilibrium at play all the time. For every gain, there is a loss of equal value. For every heart that is broken, one is sutured. It’s called balance, and it’s the only reason the universe doesn’t collapse onto itself at any given moment.

When I thought of myself, of the feelings I had, of the things I thought I understood so well, I imagined myself somehow abstractly, because that other visual recollection was painful and unpleasant for me. No sooner would I call to mind my physical appearance than the finest, most lyrical, wonderful visions would vanish in an instant - so monstrous was its disparity with the intangible, glittering world that existed in my imagination. It seemed to me that there could be no greater contrast than that between my inner life and my outward appearance; sometimes I even imagined that I was trapped in someone else's strange, almost hateful body.

No one can understand exactly what grief feels like for another person, because depending on your relationship to the deceased, you feel your grief differently from everyone else on the planet." -Hannah

As I have earlier noted, the most important things in life and in business can’t be measured. The trite bromide 'If you can measure it, you can manage it' has been a hindrance in the building a great real-world organization, just as it has been a hindrance in evaluating the real-world economy. It is character, not numbers, that make the world go ‘round. How can we possibly measure the qualities of human existence that give our lives and careers meaning? How about grace, kindness, and integrity? What value do we put on passion, devotion, and trust? How much do cheerfulness, the lilt of a human voice, and a touch of pride add to our lives? Tell me, please, if you can, how to value friendship, cooperation, dedication, and spirit. Categorically, the firm that ignores the intangible qualities that the human beings who are our colleagues bring to their careers will never build a great workforce or a great organization.

We march on, though sometimes strange moods fill our children. Our march toward security and peace is the march of freedom—the freedom that we should like to become a living part of. It is the dignity of the individual to live in a society of free men, where the spirit of understanding and belief exists; of understanding that all men, whatever their color, race, religion or estate, should be given equal opportunity to serve themselves and each other according to their needs and abilities. But we are not really free unless we use what we produce. So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us, so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves. It is only when we have plenty to eat—plenty of everything— that we begin to understand what freedom means. To us, freedom is not an intangible thing. When we have enough to eat, then we are healthy enough to enjoy what we eat. Then we have the time and ability to read and think and discuss things. Then we are not merely living but also becoming a creative part of life. It is only then that we become a growing part of democracy.

My best friend Zoe has a perfect rear end and stick legs, and long, silky black hair. She is obviously not descended from William Penn. There are no dowdy pilgrims in her ancestry. Whereas I am grounded and mired in this place, she's like milkweed fluff that will take off with the first strong breeze. Stronger than fluff, though. She's like a bullet just waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

Of course these minimum life requirements don't fully address what it means to be alive. For even beyond all the metabolic processes, there was also an intangible essence separating the living from the not. Call it a soul, or just a need we had. Every living thing possessed a certain energy or life-force that infused even the unicellular among us.

I think there could be different versions of the truth. You choose your truth, and then you build your life around it." -Danny

But perception becomes truth if you can get people to see it your way. Truth is a much more fluid concept than you choose to believe it is" -Danny

None of them are wholesome. There are straight men, and there are gay men, but there are no wholesome men" -Zoe

You can make a story mean anything, Meoraq. But that's the thing with you religious people, isn't it? God is this glorious intangibility, so no proof becomes proof just by how you spin it.

Oh, to let go of the tangible things and believe in the intangibles like love, joy and faith. It is a hard lesson, for humans are taught that money buys stability but look, there are many rich people who are so unhappy! Look around. The world is yours for the taking. Love is its most precious resource. When we are all united in Heaven, you will value nothing that you have valued here. There is a sense of peace so deep no dream in this world has ever brought even a dim imagining of it.

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives which were people.

He smiles at me, feeling the same elation I am, I can tell. I can tell because the feeling hangs between us like a rope. When you share a feeling with someone it takes on matter and weight. Even if you're the only ones who can sense it, it becomes a tangible thing with properties like shape and weight and heat." -Hannah

All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic sceptic has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.

It's like being dropped into a black hole. A vacuum of existence. When I turn around, I will be instantly orphaned because I'll know no one can hack it. And no one is in charge. But it's worse than being orphaned because at the same time I am tethered to his failure. His problems are tied around my heart. I will never get away. I am afraid. But I turn around.

When our poor, faultily sensitive vision can perceive a thing, we say that it is visible. When the nerves of touch can feel it, we say that it is tangible. Yet I tell you there are beings intangible to our physical sense, yet whose presence is felt by the spirit, and invisible to our eyes merely because those organs are not attuned to the light as reflected from their bodies. But light passed through the screen, which we are about to use has a wavelength novel to the scientific world, and by it you shall see with the eyes of the flesh that which has been invisible since life began. Have no fear! ("Unseen - Unfeared")

There are many that enter into friendships and relationships with unrealistic expectations. God has taught me how to stop having high expectations in people, and instead put expectations in Him. He gives humans choices. No matter how "good", strong, or well-meaning a person may be, it's unrealistic to think that he or she can fulfill our every expectation. We live in a world where humans want power; as you can see, everything requires power from the intangible things to the tangible things. Be careful of who you trust because who they truly are, may not be who you thought they were even if you've known them for years. Sometimes the greatest backstabbers are the ones you trusted after many years and then they eventually show their true colors. Such is life.

Love, my son, cannot be quantified by how and why. It is the intangible tether that connects your heart to others. It holds no conditions or rules, for if it did, it would not be love, but simply convenience. It is not found in the ‘because’, it is found in the ‘and yet’. Your father is strong, compassionate, and understanding, but it is not because of those things that I love him. Rather, they are why I admire him. He is also foolhardy, pig-headed, and he always says the wrong things. And yet, I love him anyway.

I know that small-town silence, I'd run into it before, intangible as smoke and solid as stone. We honed it on the British for centuries and it's ingrained, the instinct for a place to close up like a fist when the police come knocking. Sometimes it means nothing more than that; but it's a powerful thing, that silence, dark and tricky and lawless. It still hides bones buried somewhere in the hills, arsenals cached in pigsties. The British underestimated it, fell for the practiced half-witted looks, but I knew and Sam knew: it's dangerous.

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things. I like the way the knife claps when it meets the cutting board. I like the haze of sweet air that hovers over a hot cake as it sits, cooling, on the counter. I like the way a strip of orange peel looks on an empty plate. But what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that’s what we’re often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells.

Rowena was wrong. She was so wrong. There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.

We fail to build slack because we focus on what must be done now and do not think enough about all the things that can arise in the future. The present is imminently clear whereas future contingences are less pressing and harder to imagine. When the intangible future comes face to face with the palpable present, slack feels like a luxury.

Who you affect is more powerful than who you are at any given moment. Nothing is as enduring as a great memory. In the end, its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, and feelings that last. Stone cracks. Wood rots. Skin dies. But great thoughts, beautiful experiences, and inspiring legends… they live forever. If you can change the way people think and feel, the way they see themselves, and the way they interpret the world, it means you can change the way they live their lives, and how they affect others. That is, by far, the longest lasting thing you can create.

They were interesting things, stars. Like clouds, you could see them and could not deny their existence. Yet you couldn’t touch them, hold them, or own them. You couldn’t feel them. Love was somewhat the opposite, he pondered. It can’t be seen but it can be felt. It was intangible, like the stars and the clouds, like the heavens and destiny. Yet it existed, he knew this to be true.

But the world now seemed changed. He went about in it with greater confidence, with a feeling of prowess that had not been his in the days before the battle. He had looked upon life in a more ferocious aspect; he had fought; he had buried his teeth in the flesh of a foe; and he had survived. And because of all this, he carried himself more boldly, with a touch of defiance that was new in him. He was no longer afraid of minor things, and much of his timidity had vanished, though the unknown never ceased to press upon him with its mysteries and terrors, intangible and ever menacing.

Sparks come from the very source of light and are made of the purest brightness—so say the oldest legends. When a human Being is to be born, a spark begins to fall. First it flies through the darkness of outer space, then through galaxies, and finally, before it falls here, to Earth, the poor thing bumps into the orbits of planets. Each of them contaminates the spark with some Properties, while it darkens and fades. First Pluto draws the frame for this cosmic experiment and reveals its basic principles—life is a fleeting incident, followed by death, which will one day let the spark escape from the trap; there’s no other way out. Life is like an extremely demanding testing ground. From now on everything you do will count, every thought and every deed, but not for you to be punished or rewarded afterward, but because it is they that build your world. This is how the machine works. As it continues to fall, the spark crosses Neptune’s belt and is lost in its foggy vapors. As consolation Neptune gives it all sorts of illusions, a sleepy memory of its exodus, dreams about flying, fantasy, narcotics and books. Uranus equips it with the capacity for rebellion; from now on that will be proof of the memory of where the spark is from. As the spark passes the rings of Saturn, it becomes clear that waiting for it at the bottom is a prison. A labor camp, a hospital, rules and forms, a sickly body, fatal illness, the death of a loved one. But Jupiter gives it consolation, dignity and optimism, a splendid gift: things-will-work-out. Mars adds strength and aggression, which are sure to be of use. As it flies past the Sun, it is blinded, and all that it has left of its former, far-reaching consciousness is a small, stunted Self, separated from the rest, and so it will remain. I imagine it like this: a small torso, a crippled being with its wings torn off, a Fly tormented by cruel children; who knows how it will survive in the Gloom. Praise the Goddesses, now Venus stands in the way of its Fall. From her the spark gains the gift of love, the purest sympathy, the only thing that can save it and other sparks; thanks to the gifts of Venus they will be able to unite and support each other. Just before the Fall it catches on a small, strange planet that resembles a hypnotized Rabbit, and doesn’t turn on its own axis, but moves rapidly, staring at the Sun. This is Mercury, who gives it language, the capacity to communicate. As it passes the Moon, it gains something as intangible as the soul. Only then does it fall to Earth, and is immediately clothed in a body. Human, animal or vegetable. That’s the way it is. —

Samuel had strengthened the blood-tie between them, but no more than this. They would cherish each other in sickness and in health, walk through life sharing its pleasures and its sorrows, sleep side by side at night in the little room above the porch, grow old and frail, resting at last, not parted, in Lanoc Churchyard—but from the beginning to the end they would have no knowledge of one another. Janet’s feeling for Samuel ran parallel to her feeling for Thomas. The one was her husband, the other was her child. Samuel depended on her for care and for comfort until he should grow old enough to look after himself. She washed him and dressed him, seated him beside her in his high chair at table and fed him, helped him with his first steps and his first words, gave him all the tenderness and the affection he demanded from her. She gave to both Thomas and Samuel her natural spontaneity of feeling and a great simplicity of heart; but the spirit of Janet was free and unfettered, waiting to rise from its self-enforced seclusion to mingle with intangible things, like the wind, the sea, and the skies, hand in hand with the one for whom she waited. Then she, too, would become part of these things forever, abstract and immortal. Because

...Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. "Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!" he sighed. "Who knows what's going to happen to them?

What is this thing of intangible substance that wreaks consequential havoc on our lives? What is this sensitive thread that runs through heart and mind, and when given the slightest tremor grasps hold of all sanity, dragging the afflicted down to insufferable depths or flinging him weightless to euphoric heights? What is this magic we would deem imagination, fantasy, or pretend if not for the evidence of power manifest by human consequences? Effortlessly controlling us, it affects the infected in an instant. It takes but one word, one thought, one act to become immersed. To stop it is hopeless. To stifle it, demanding. To think to master it is both improbable and pretentious. What is this invisible hand that blinds our eyes and reigns hearts with a string? It is nature's drug and poison we call emotion.

We drive northwest for an hour to Michigan. Michigan is pretty much like rural New Jersey, except it's flattened out and well planned and pristine. Michigan would be New Jersey if you ran over it with a steamroller, excavated everything, and then put it back in neat rows with lots of space for everyone to move around in. It is practical and pretty, and it's a place where nothing spontaneous happens. This is a place where nothing happens unless people sit around and have a meeting about it first. The people are mostly white, which is weird, and the squirrels are black, also weird.

Color Theory" How yellow the sky how little the understanding Intangible the things we know for sure Dusty silica clouds over Europe the very same day We brought our baby home His second Too yellow For comfort Too sleepy Just sleepy enough For us to sleep ourselves That was last night Today the clouds shift Outside shifts Rain and shadows A mezzotint glow Then no glow Heart or soul Exactly seven pounds of civilization Hematochrome and skin and bilirubin Yawns blinks and can’t make up his made-up mind The atmosphere can’t keep its own eyes open We can’t keep our own eyes closed

You don’t get it just like you don’t get yourself. Sometimes the simple beauty of a woman is more powerful than anything. It doesn’t need to be a massive painting, it doesn’t need to be filled with a lot of things going on in the canvas space, and it doesn’t need a lot of fancy art techniques. It’s just her. Her beauty. Her in her raw form with those intangible attributes that drove men crazy. Those intangible qualities that could topple kings. Those made Leonardo paint her. Those are still bringing people here to look at her and ponder over. It’s real love. An unfiltered and non-romanticized version. It’s real because it doesn’t need to be anything more. Just like you don’t need to be anything more. You’ve got those intangible qualities to bring millions of people to visit a museum to see you every year. You in your raw form have that power. People don’t forget someone like that. They’re etched into your bones and molded into your core.

We are the center. In each of our minds - some may call it arrogance, or selfishness - we are the center, and all the world moves about us, and for us, and because of us. This is the paradox of community, the one and the whole, the desires of the one often in direct conflict with the needs of the whole. Who among us has not wondered if all the world is no more than a personal dream? I do not believe that such thoughts are arrogant or selfish. It is simply a matter of perception; we can empathize with someone else, but we cannot truly see the world as another person sees it, or judge events as they affect the mind and the heart of another, even a friend. But we must try. For the sake of all the world, we must try. This is the test of altruism, the most basic and undeniable ingredient for society. Therein lies the paradox, for ultimately, logically, we each must care more about ourselves than about others, and yet, if, as rational beings we follow that logical course, we place our needs and desires above the needs of our society, and then there is no community. I come from Menzoberranzan, city of drow, city of self. I have seen that way of selfishness. I have seen it fail miserably. When self-indulgence rules, then all the community loses, and in the end, those striving for personal gains are left with nothing of any real value. Because everything of value that we will know in this life comes from our relationships with those around us. Because there is nothing material that measures against the intangibles of love and friendship. Thus, we must overcome that selfishness and we must try, we must care. I saw this truth plainly following the attack on Captain Deudermont in Watership. My first inclination was to believe that my past had precipitated the trouble, that my life course had again brought pain to a friend. I could not bear this thought. I felt old and I felt tired. Subsequently learning that the trouble was possibly brought on by Deudermont's old enemies, not my own, gave me more heart for the fight. Why is that? The danger to me was no less, nor was the danger to Deudermont, or to Catti-brie or any of the others about us. Yet my emotions were real, very real, and I recognized and understood them, if not their source. Now, in reflection, I recognize that source, and take pride in it. I have seen the failure of self-indulgence; I have run from such a world. I would rather die because of Deudermont's past than have him die because of my own. I would suffer the physical pains, even the end of my life. Better that than watch one I love suffer and die because of me. I would rather have my physical heart torn from my chest, than have my heart of hearts, the essence of love, the empathy and the need to belong to something bigger than my corporeal form, destroyed. They are a curious thing, these emotions. How they fly in the face of logic, how they overrule the most basic instincts. Because, in the measure of time, in the measure of humanity, we sense those self-indulgent instincts to be a weakness, we sense that the needs of the community must outweigh the desires of the one. Only when we admit to our failures and recognize our weaknesses can we rise above them. Together.

I fancy myself a writer. And writing, in its most eloquent manner, since time became a concept indoctrinated by true troglodytes, tickles my dong; it throttles my flume; it punts my epididymus to horizons fantastical. And not just writing bullshit; a few seemingly overused words to describe the belched bark of a goddamn sequoia, but actually writing. Writing to me is not about thinking, it's not about personality traits or hell, even the conveyance of feelings. Writing is like breathing to me. I have to do it. I have to inhale it and exhale it, no matter what comes in and likewise what comes out. Traversing the slopes of the soul, scratching that all but intangible itch, I find solace in the abyss of my complacency. It‟s not for recognition, not for income or monetary satisfaction. None of that really matters to me. The only thing that matters to me is finding the way to transfer a thought to paper; a heartbeat to the surface; a blink and a gasp to submissively correspond with the outcry of tangible suspense.

When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database or warehouse it. You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). Since we prefer to deal with someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege. We call that branding. Brand companies can command higher prices for similar products and services from companies without brands because they are trusted for what they promise. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

Tatiana thought Deda was the smartest man on earth. Ever since Poland was trampled over in 1939, Deda had been saying that Hitler was coming to the Soviet Union. A few months ago in the spring, he suddenly started bringing home canned goods. Too many canned goods for Babushka’s liking. Babushka had no interest in spending part of Deda’s monthly pay on an intangible such as just in case. She would scoff at him. What are you talking about, war? she would say, glaring at the canned ham. Who is going to eat this, ever? I will never eat this garbage, why do you spend good money on garbage? Why can’t you get marinated mushrooms, or tomatoes? And Deda, who loved Babushka more than a woman deserved to be loved by a man, would bow his head, let her vent her feelings, say nothing, but the following month be back carrying more cans of ham. He also bought sugar and he bought coffee and he bought tobacco, and he bought some vodka, too. He had less luck with keeping these items stocked because for every birthday, anniversary, May Day, the vodka was broken open and the tobacco smoked and the coffee drunk and the sugar put into bread and pie dough and tea. Deda was a man unable to deny his family anything, but he denied himself. So on his own birthday he refused to open the vodka. But Babushka still opened the bag of sugar to make him blueberry pie. The one thing that remained constant and grew by a can or two each month was the ham, which everyone hated and no one ate.

I don’t like cops. I mean, it’s all well and good that they’re out there defending us against anarchy and all, but most of the cops I’ve met are suspicious of everything and everyone. Every little thing needs to have a motive behind it. As a rule I find them cynical and too analytical, very one-plus-one-equals-two types. There’s no way a cop would take me at my word. I mean, I could just see myself walking up to the police counter and saying, ‘Hey, I have some information about a murder. I’m a psychic, so please take me seriously.’ They’d laugh in my face as they locked me up in the looney bin. And what if I was right? What if the information I had did help them? You can bet that instead of taking my gift seriously they’d think I had something to do with the crime. No, I don’t want any part of it. There’s no way I can prove how I got my information, and cops are big on proof. They’d want some evidence as to how I knew such and such. Well, in my profession, proof is a hard thing to come by. I live in an intangible world. I don’t know why I know things, I just do, and that doesn’t translate well in the world of your average lawman.

The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory - at best, a falsifying receptacle - but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as - if not sooner than - we are aware of it as present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until arrival of the preservative, cinema. The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassoed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification. [...] The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the flaws of aging, if retained, increase the presence of the past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches artificial worm-holes into raw or smokes shadows of fresh pain with a candle to produce an apparently aged artefact. Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine.

The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world‘s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean. It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of to-day and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans. This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity. What did it mean to the Atlanteans? We must look for some hint of an answer in the few remnants of culture still surviving from peoples whose own histories claimed Atlantean origin. We must probe behind the degenerate rituals of races like the Incas and the Mayas, mounting to the purer worship of their distant ancestors, and we shall find that the loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they build pyramidal Temples of the Sun throughout ancient America. Such temples were either variants or slightly distorted copies of similar temples which had existed in Atlantis. After Plato went to Egypt and settled for a while in the ancient School of Heliopolis, where he lived and studied during thirteen years, the priest-teachers, usually very guarded with foreigners, favoured the earnest young Greek enquirer with information drawn from their well-preserved secret records. Among other things they told him that a great flat-topped pyramid had stood in the centre of the island of Atlantis, and that on this top there had been build the chief temple of the continent – a sun temple. […] The Sphinx was the revered emblem in stone of a race which looked upon Light as the nearest thing to God in this dense material world. Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kind of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp. So in the Book of Genesis the first created element was Light, without which nothing else could be created. „The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Deep,“ wrote Egyptian-trained Moses. „And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.“ Not only that, it is also a perfect symbol of that heavenly Light which dawns within the deep places of man‘s soul when he yields heart and mind to God; it is a magnificent memorial to that divine illumination which awaits him secretly even amid the blackest despairs. Man, in turning instinctively to the face and presence of the Sun, turns to the body of his Creator. And from the sun, light is born: from the sun it comes streaming into our world. Without the sun we should remain perpetually in horrible darkness; crops would not grow: mankind would starve, die, and disappear from the face of this planet. If this reverence for Light and for its agent, the sun, was the central tenet of Atlantean religion, so also was it the central tenet of early Egyptian religion. Ra, the sun-god, was first, the father and creator of all the other gods, the Maker of all things, the One, the self-born [...] If the Sphinx were connected with this religion of Light, it would surely have some relationship with the sun.

For physical issues, we have an entire pharmacopoeia of pain medicine. For the actual pain of grief, we have . . . nothing. It’s always seemed so bizarre to me that we have an answer for almost every physical pain, but for this—some of the most intense pain we can experience—there is no medicine. You’re just supposed to feel it. And in a way, that’s true. The answer to pain is simply to feel it. Some traditions speak of practicing compassion in the face of pain, rather than trying to fix it. As I understand the Buddhist teaching, the fourth form of compassion in the Brahma Viharas, or the four immeasurables, describes an approach to the kinds of pain that cannot be fixed: upekkha, or equanimity. Upekkha is the practice of staying emotionally open and bearing witness to the pain while dwelling in equanimity around one’s limited ability to effect change. This form of compassion—for self, for others—is about remaining calm enough to feel everything, to remain calm while feeling everything, knowing that it can’t be changed. Equanimity (upekkha) is said to be the hardest form of compassion to teach, and the hardest to practice. It’s not, as is commonly understood, equanimity in the way of being unaffected by what’s happened, but more a quality of clear, calm attention in the face of immoveable truth. When something cannot be changed, the “enlightened” response is to pay attention. To feel it. To turn toward it and say, “I see you.” That’s the big secret of grief: the answer to the pain is in the pain. Or, as e. e. cummings wrote, healing of the wound is to be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It seems too intangible to be of use, but by allowing your pain to exist, you change it somehow. There’s power in witnessing your own pain. The challenge is to stay present in your heart, to your heart, to your own deep self, even, and especially, when that self is broken. Pain wants to be heard. It deserves to be heard. Denying or minimizing the reality of pain makes it worse. Telling the truth about the immensity of your pain—which is another way of paying attention—makes things different, if not better. It’s important to find those places where your grief gets to be as bad as it is, where it gets to suck as much as it does. Let your pain stretch out. Take up all the space it needs. When so many others tell you that your grief has to be cleaned up or contained, hearing that there is enough room for your pain to spread out, to unfurl—it’s healing. It’s a relief. The more you open to your pain, the more you can just be with it, the more you can give yourself the tenderness and care you need to survive this. Your pain needs space. Room to unfold. I think this is why we seek out natural landscapes that are larger than us. Not just in grief, but often in grief. The expanding horizon line, the sense of limitless space, a landscape wide and deep and vast enough to hold what is—we need those places. Sometimes grief like yours cannot be held by the universe itself. True. Sometimes grief needs more than an endless galaxy. Maybe your pain could wrap around the axle of the universe several times. Only the stars are large enough to take it on. With enough room to breathe, to expand, to be itself, pain softens. No longer confined and cramped, it can stop thrashing at the bars of its cage, can stop defending itself against its right to exist. There isn’t anything you need to do with your pain. Nothing you need to do about your pain. It simply is. Give it your attention, your care. Find ways to let it stretch out, let it exist. Tend to yourself inside it. That’s so different from trying to get yourself out of it. The way to come to pain is with open eyes, and an open heart, committed to bearing witness to your own broken place. It won’t fix anything. And it changes everything.