Life Is Hazy Quotes

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...

People live on the flow of the daily reality and they surge on the waves of hazy expectations. They can experience pleasant junctures and try to catch and enjoy each special moment that is offered to them. Until life takes them by surprise.

We are what we are: a handful of dust, and although life remains a temporal enterprise, we recognize we have a mission. Through resilience and empathy, we can take a walk on the path of thought and wonder and brighten up the hazy remains of the day. (“A handful of dust”)

When the ashes of the wildfire of love have been scattered in the hazy den of oblivion and emotions have gone out of commission, life gets unremittingly tangled up, if no inner voices emerge to enlighten the looming shadows of hesitant expectations, if no shimmer sparks the magic appeal of ‘Being in the world’. ("Fish for silence." )

When the shimmer of the past is melting into the presence, spreading a scent of attentiveness and inquiringness, our mind may ask for a new reading of the story of our life. An innocuous flicker from a hazy sequence in our memory lane can affect our current awareness, making us raise questions, throwing new light on our expectations; crafting an airy vision of the future. ("A change of vision" )

The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.

I think you will agree that life's plans are not always tied up in neat little packages. Occasionally we find ourselves at unexpected crossroads with more than one opportunity from which to choose. Time itself is often the best indicator of which decision to make, for it can tell so many thing that are now hazy.

It's a curse - this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.

A question that always makes me hazy is it me or are the others crazy' Albert Einstein

Humans were so preoccupied with love. They were all desperate to form an attachment to one person they could refer to as their other half. It seemed from my reading of literature that being in love meant becoming the beloveds entire world. The rest of the universe paled into insignificance compared to the lovers. When they were separated, each fell into a melancholy state, and only when they were reunited did their hearts start beating again. Only when they were together could really see the colors of the world. When they were apart, that color leached away, leaving everything a hazy gray. I lay in bed, wondering about the intensity of this emotion that was so irrational and so irrefutably human. What if a persons face was so sacred to you it was permanently inscribed in your memory? What if their smell and touch were dearer to you than life itself?

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, "It's delicious!" rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.

High in the hazy sky, the snowfkakes looked tiny and all alike, but as they drifted past the narrow window of the sewing room, all were unique - long or round or triangular - as if they'd borrowed their shapes from the clouds they'd come from.

All her life she had longed to breach that pale and hazy boundary between enough and plenty.

Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.

It's a curse—this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I did not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy... In other words, Scarlett, I am a coward.

…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." –Maxine Hong Kingston

Those static images have the uncanny ability to jar the memory and bring places and people back to life. They bridge the present with the past and validate as real what the passage of time has turned into hazy recollections. Were it not for them, my experiences would have remained as just imperfect memories of perfect moments.

With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for the having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars.

I am seeing that woman for the first and last time. I will never in my lifetime see her again.’ My thoughts floated aimlessly, like a cork down an uncharted river. For a moment they bobbed around the woman beneath the thatch. What did she matter to me? But I could not rid myself of the thought that, for an instant, she was a part of my life that would never be repeated; from my point of view it was as if she were already dead: a brief delay of the train, a call from inside the house, and that woman would never have existed in my life. Everything seemed fleeting, transitory, futile, nebulous. My brain was not functioning well, but María was a recurring vision, something hazy and melancholy.

I have a scar-a faint gouge in my knee from when I fell down on the sidewalk as a child. It's always seemed stupid to me that none of the pain I've experienced has left a visible mark; sometimes, without a way to prove it to myself. I began to doubt that I had lied through it at all, with the memories becoming hazy over time. I want to have some kind of reminder that while wounds heal, they don't disappear forever- I carry them everywhere, always, and that is the way of things, the way of scars. That is what this tattoo will be, for me: a scar. And it seems fitting that it should document the worst memory of pain I have.

mentally try to add up all the things I’ve done in my life, but no clear picture emerges, nothing that will tell me what kind of person I am—just a lot of haziness and blurred edges, indistinct memories of laughing and driving around. I feel like I’m trying to take a picture into the sun: all of the people in my memories are coming back featureless and interchangeable.

Don’t leave me,” I yell as he walks down the path leading to another life. Turning and glancing at me over his shoulder, his eyes are no longer gleaming their perfect shade of green; they’re cloudy, hazy even. “I’m not,” he says as he keeps walking. “You left me, beautiful girl.

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer?

I have nothing to offer you' said Hactar faintly, 'but tricks of the light. It is possible to be comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all you have.' His voice evanesced, and in the dark a long, velvet paisley-covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape. ... At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that is what sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa.

But as I began to write this book, I realised that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning. With the help of my mother, the memories of our lives in North Korea and China cane back to me like scenes from a forgotten nightmare. Some of the images reappeared with a terrible clarity; others were hazy, or scrambled like a deck of cards spilled on the floor. The process of writing has been the process of remembering, and of trying to make sense out of those memories.

Hey,Dad, remember earlier this week, when I got stabbed?" "I have a hazy recollection, yes." "Is it worth it? Being head of the Council? I mean, if people are always gunning for you, why not hand it over to someone else? You could go on vacation.Have a life.Date." I waited for Dad to embrace his inner Mr. Darcy again and get all huffy, but if anything,he just looked rueful. "One,I made a solemn vow to use my powers to help the Council. Two, things are turbulent now, but that won't always be the case. And I have faith that you'll make a wonderful head of the Council someday,Sophie." Yeah,except for that whole sleeping with enemy part,I thought.Wait, not that I would actually be sleeping with...I mean,it's a metaphor. There would only be metaphorical sleeping. My face must have reflected some of the weirdness happening in my brain, because Dad narrowed his eyes at me before continuing, "As for dating, theres no point." "Why?" "Because I'm still in love with your mother." Whoa.Okay, not exactly the answer I was expecting. Before I could even process that, Dad rushed on, saying, "Please don't let that get your hopes up. There is no way your mother and I could or will ever reunite." I held up my hand. "Dad,relax. I'm not twelve, and this isn't The Parent Trap.

Deaf and blind to all but her pants and her hazy bluebell eyes as she rocked into bliss, he clenched her hips as if she held his life in her hands. Like she already held his heart.

Life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I did not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy…

Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled

One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love. So much meaning attached to this one little word. People bandied it about freely, using it to describe their attachments to possessions, pets, vacation destinations, and favorite foods. In the same breath they then applied this word to the person they considered most important in their lives. Wasn’t that insulting? Shouldn’t there be some other term to describe deeper emotion? Humans were so preoccupied with love. They were all desperate to form an attachment to one person they could refer to as their “other half.” It seemed from my reading of literature that being in love meant becoming the beloved’s entire world. The rest of the universe paled into insignificance compared to the lovers. When they were separated, each fell into a melancholy state, and only when they were reunited did their hearts start beating again. Only when they were together could they really see the colors of the world. When they were apart, that color leached away, leaving everything a hazy gray. I lay in bed, wondering about the intensity of this emotion that was so irrational and so irrefutably human. What if a person’s face was so sacred to you it was permanently inscribed in your memory? What if their smell and touch were dearer to you than life itself? Of course, I knew nothing about human love, but the idea had always been intriguing to me. Celestial beings never pretended to understand the intensity of human relationships; but I found it amazing how humans could allow another person to take over their hearts and minds. It was ironic how love could awaken them to the wonders of the universe, while at the same time confine their attention to one another.

I settled deeper into the pillow and tried to relax. It was hard when I knew I was about to be flooded with memories of a life I hadn’t lived yet. Really, two lives I hadn’t lived yet. It would only seem like five minutes to Laila, but to me it would feel like a month. I concentrated on the energies around me, and everything went hazy.

When you feel that you aren’t like everyone else or feel tainted by what has happened to you, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future. In fact, for many survivors, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the future at all. Many of us are caught in a state where we’re still just trying to survive (our sole focus during trauma) and can’t think much beyond that. Time for us is frozen and the future feels hazy at best.

There are people who say, 'Well, your name is also about patriarchy because it is your father's name.' Indeed. But the point is simply this: whether it came from my father or from the moon, it is the name that I have had since I was born, the name with which I travelled my life's milestones, the name I have answered to since the first day I went to kindergarten in Nsukka on a hazy morning and my teacher said, 'Answer "present" if you hear your name. Number one: Adichie!'.

I'm serious,' he said, though aware of how odd it was that he should choose to inform his wife of a personal crisis by comparing it to the experiences of a mystery novel heroine whom he had created. Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it sometimes was for a writer? And if so... was there a book in that idea?

She took my morning with her. My day begins in the afternoon, and it’s always hazy.

A lot of things in my life had been hazy up to this point, but my feelings about this were clear.

This book is not the memoir of a contented man. It's not the poignant reflections of a white-haired guru who has finally figured out the secret to contentment. It's more like sweaty, bloody, hastily scribbled notes from a battlefield. I'm still struggling to escape the sinister fingers on this conspiracy. I'm still waging war against the discontentment that rages in my life. I can see contentment in the distance, like a hazy oasis, but I have to pick my way through a minefield to get there. I'm not the contented man God wants me to be, but I'm fighting to get there. I'm writing this book the hope that you'll join me in the fight.

The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar's closing, when there were no cabs on the street. And so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant, hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. 'Chthonic', he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance from the glory. It was so late, there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves. She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, 'Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on Earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.' She, who drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true, there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous bolder blocking their future had rolled away. 'They'll still be here when we're gone,' he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he'd be sozzeled. 'The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches, they will be the kings of the Earth.'... 'They deserve this place more than we do,' she said. 'We've been reckless with our gifts.' He smiled and looked up. There were no stars, there was too much smog for them. 'Did you know,' he said, 'they just found out just a while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.' ...She felt a sting behind here eyes, but couldn't say why this thought touched her. He saw clear through and understood. He knew her. The things he didn't know about her would sink an ocean liner. He knew her. 'We're lonely down here,' he said, 'it's true, but we're not alone.' In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

Ecclesiastes This is a book of the Old Testament. I don't believe I've ever read this section of the Bible - I know my Genesis pretty well and my Ten Commandments (I like lists), but I'm hazy on a lot of the other parts. Here, the Britannica provides a handy Cliff Notes version of Ecclesiastes: [the author's] observations on life convinced him that 'the race is not swift, nor the battle strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all' (9:11). Man's fate, the author maintains, does not depend on righteous or wicked conduct but is an inscrutable mystery that remains hidden in God (9:1). All attempts to penetrate this mystery and thereby gain the wisdom necessary to secure one's fate are 'vanity' or futile. In the face of such uncertainty, the author's counsel is to enjoy the good things that God provides while one has them to enjoy. This is great. I've accumulated hundreds of facts in the last seven thousand pages, but i've been craving profundity and perspective. Yes, there was that Dyer poem, but that was just cynical. This is the real thing: the deepest paragraph I've read so far in the encyclopedia. Instant wisdom. It couldn't be more true: the race does not go to the swift. How else to explain the mouth-breathing cretins I knew in high school who now have multimillion-dollar salaries? How else to explain my brilliant friends who are stuck selling wheatgrass juice at health food stores? How else to explain Vin Diesel's show business career? Yes, life is desperately, insanely, absurdly unfair. But Ecclesiastes offers exactly the correct reaction to that fact. There's nothing to be done about it, so enjoy what you can. Take pleasure in the small things - like, for me, Julie's laugh, some nice onion dip, the insanely comfortable beat-up leather chair in our living room. I keep thinking about Ecclesiastes in the days that follow. What if this is the best the encyclopedia has to offer? What if I found the meaning of life on page 347 of the E volume? The Britannica is not a traditional book, so there's no reason why the big revelation should be at the end.

You. Man at the machine and man in the workshop. If tomorrow they tell you you are to make no more water-pipes and saucepans but are to make steel helmets and machine-guns, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Woman at the counter and woman in the office. If tomorrow they tell you you are to fill shells and assemble telescopic sights for snipers' rifles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Research worker in the laboratory. If tomorrow they tell you you are to invent a new death for the old life, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Priest in the pulpit. If tomorrow they tell you you are to bless murder and declare war holy, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Pilot in your aeroplane. If tomorrow they tell you you are to carry bombs over the cities, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Man of the village and man of the town. If tomorrow they come and give you your call-up papers, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Mother in Normandy and mother in the Ukraine, mother in Vancouver and in London, you on the Hwangho and on the Mississippi, you in Naples and Hamburg and Cairo and Oslo - mothers in all parts of the earth, mothers of the world, if tomorrow they tell you you are to bear new soldiers for new battles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! For if you do not say NO - if YOU do not say no - mothers, then: then! In the bustling hazy harbour towns the big ships will fall silent as corpses against the dead deserted quay walls, their once shimmering bodies overgrown with seaweed and barnacles, smelling of graveyards and rotten fish. The trams will lie like senseless glass-eyed cages beside the twisted steel skeleton of wires and track. The sunny juicy vine will rot on decaying hillsides, rice will dry in the withered earth, potatoes will freeze in the unploughed land and cows will stick their death-still legs into the air like overturned chairs. In the fields beside rusted ploughs the corn will be flattened like a beaten army. Then the last human creature, with mangled entrails and infected lungs, will wander around, unanswered and lonely, under the poisonous glowing sun, among the immense mass graves and devastated cities. The last human creature, withered, mad, cursing, accusing - and the terrible accusation: WHY? will die unheard on the plains, drift through the ruins, seep into the rubble of churches, fall into pools of blood, unheard, unanswered, the last animal scream of the last human animal - All this will happen tomorrow, tomorrow, perhaps, perhaps even tonight, perhaps tonight, if - if - You do not say NO.

This fear of dying would haunt me for the next forty years. It was an anguish that drove me to travel the world studying religions, magic, esotericism, alchemy, and the Kabbalah. It drove me to frequent initiatory groups, to meditate in the style of numerous schools, to seek out teachers, and in short wherever I went to search without limits for something that might console me in light of my transient existence. If I did not conquer death how could I live, create, love, prosper? I felt separated not only from the world but also from life. Those who thought they knew me only knew the makeup on a corpse. During those excruciating years, all the works I accomplished, as well as all my love affairs, were anesthetics to help me bear the anguish that gnawed at my soul. But in the depths of my being, in a hazy kind of way, I knew that this state of permanent agony was a disease that I had to cure by becoming my own therapist. At its heart, this was not about finding a magic potion to keep me from dying, but above all about learning to die with happiness.

I dismissed this course of action, sensing my own reserves of strengths, but I experimented with the idea and took it as far as I could in a game I christened Bus Stop: on summer nights, I would stretch out on the road in front of my house, on hot, grainy asphalt scattered with sharp bits of gravel, and watch and wait for growling motors, the blinding movement of headlights, and I weighed up the pros and cons, what tied me to life like a blood oath, what left me cold, or tired me out; and when the noise grew sharper, more grating, and when the headlights from the first bend in the road began to cut out the sides of the buildings and project a slow, revolving shadow dance on the wall, I always came back to the same conclusion - that I felt something stir inside me, as hazy and phony as a childhood memory, as insistent as a hit song you'd heard so often you couldn't get its bitterness out of your head, something that promised me a better future, only somewhere else. And I would unpeel myself from the road, I'd pick myself up, what was left of me, what could still be of some use, and slowly make my way back to the pink gravel of the sidewalk, just like the one my little retarded friend was standing on this morning as stoic as an abandoned house awaiting demolition.

This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or rounded off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence of gaps and uncertainties. In no other scientific field would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in psychology is it otherwise. There mankind's constitutional unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge, but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it. Whoever cares for the science of mental life must accept these injustices along with it.

He pulled himself gently from my grasp without answering and stood back, suddenly a figure from another time, seen in relief upon a background of hazy hills, the life in his face a trick of the shadowing rock, as if flattened beneath layers of paint, an artist’s reminiscence of forgotten places and passions turned to dust.

There is no algorithm that exists that can recover the logical form of all everyday assertions.” 5 In short, many of our thoughts exist, hazy or cloudlike, without a definite structure or form, and yet can be effective thinking tools.Isn’t that proof of the astounding complexity of the human mind, and the magnificence of its Creator!

There's a reason that dust and life go together naturally. Sometimes it comes together in the most perfect way to make the very building blocks of life. Sometimes it sweeps in and makes everything seem hazy and dark. Sometimes it gets in my amaretto and then I have to pour a new glass, but mainly that's cat's fur, which is not really the same thing.

it is sufficient to say, that a chorus of work, the whole of my past life - but, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of it's incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five shillings.

The Life of a Day Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. but there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don't want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn't one I've been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night's meandering skunk.

I felt so lost again. Every time I started to find my way, I seemed to slip further down. How could I trust what Gus and I have? How could I trust my own feelings? People were complicated. They weren't math problems; they were collections of feelings and decisions and dumb luck. The world was complicated too, not a beautifully hazy French film, but a disastrous, horrible mess, speckled with brilliance and love and meaning.

I dreamed that I woke up and there was a little girl, not more than three or four years old, standing outside my window in the snow. It was dark, and she was crying and afraid. There was something familiar about her, about her eyes. And then I realized they were my mother's eyes. It was my mother as a little girl standing in the snow, shivering and helpless, a pure human being before someone did to her what she had done to me. I had this inescapable sensation that someone had hurt her and continued to hurt her for a long time. More importantly, she had once been innocent. I realized then that the difference between my mother and me was that I had had Myrtise, who for a few precious years held me and loved me, and my mother had had no one. When I woke up, the world seemed in focus for the first time in my life. After years of haziness, I had crystal clarity.

To fall half in love with someone, move on. Go confidently forward in the direction of whatever life you’d had planned, long before they ever came along. But every now and then, let your mind wander back. Every now and then, remain transfixed on the memory of their skin against yours, of their hands in your hair, of the quiet, patient moments where laughter unexpectedly escaped your lips lying beside them. Let your mind wander back until you realize that it’s not them you’re missing at all – it’s the unfulfilled possibility they embodied. Because the truth is, you never really did fall in love with them. You fell in love with their potential. You fell in love with the maybes and the could-have-beens. You fell in love with all the trips you didn’t take, the plans you didn’t make, the hazy, unintelligible future that stretched out before you without any opportunity to build upon. You fell in love with the potential of what could have happened had you been the kind of person who’d stayed. Had you been the person who could fall in love fully, without pause. You realize that you didn’t fall in love with them at all, but that you could have. That you might have. That there may always be a small part of yourself that is going to wonder ‘what if’ and that maybe you like it that way. That maybe you prefer only falling half in love because it allows you to write your own ending to the story. And theirs is a story that you want to still have and hold onto, years down the line, when you need something to write on and on and on.

I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing “hustle,” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about. I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.

So after conferring with the waiter for about an hour, the two men managed to convince him it would be easier for him if halved the bill or they'd 'report him'. Obviously, it was a bit hazy exactly who would report whom for what, but eventually, with a certain amount of swearing and arm-waving, the waiter gave up and went into the kitchen and wrote them a new bill. In the meantime Rune and Ove, nodded grimly at one another without noticing that their wives, as usual, had taken a taxi home twenty minutes earlier.

I buy my card with game credits and he gets his own. I would buy his too, but, you know. Probably better to establish money stuff from the beginning anyway. In a heterosexual relationship, it’s pretty clear who’s expected to be the gentleman. . . . It’s the gentleman. Things are hazy when you’ve got two gentlemen. The only person I feel comfortable paying for me outside my family is Dylan, but that’s because I know he’ll be in my life forever and I’ll pay him back if I ever hit it big. Hudson wasn’t a guarantee. Neither is Arthur.

Now the white shark has returned to one of America’s most iconic summertime destinations, and it’s challenging our perception of what the ocean is to us. For the first time in a long time, we have a hazy sense of what it means not to be the top predator. For the first time in a long time, we’ve had to consider what it means to be prey, even if we’re only mistaken as such. What do we do with those emotions? Do we celebrate our ecological success—the restoration of an apex predator to an ecosystem—or do we defend our hard-won territory?

The pain of heartache often comes in unpredictable episodes of intense pain that come and go. These episodes are called grief “spasms”—you feel overwhelmed by your sense of sorrow. You may hurt physically and feel like you have the flu. Consumed by your own pain and situation,you feel disconnected to everyone else and life takes on a surreal, hazy quality. Stumbling through each day, you feel taxed by the most mundane tasks. All you can think about is how much you hurt. The intensity of your feelings may frighten you, but this is normal. You’re not losing control; you’re not going crazy. You are grieving.

The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace. As he stood there, silver trumpets prolonged their note, as if reluctant to leave the lovely sight which their blast had called forth; and Chastity, Purity, and Modesty, inspired, no doubt, by Curiosity, peeped in at the door and threw a garment like a towel at the naked form which, unfortunately, fell short by several inches. Orlando looked at himself up and down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discompose, and went presumably, to his bath. We many take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change in sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory - but in the future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’ - her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark spots had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change in sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando has always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

I trudge toward the porch, entertaining the idea of running the other way. But technically, I shouldn't be in any trouble. It wasn't my car. I'm not the one who got a ticket. Samantha Forza did. And the picture on Samantha Forza's driver's license looks a lot like Rayna. She told Officer Downing that she swerved to keep from hitting a camel, which Officer Downing graciously interpreted as a deer after she described it as "a hairy animal with four legs and a horn." Since no one formed a search party to look for either a camel or a unicorn, I figured we were in the clear. But from Mom's expression, I'm miles from clear. "Hi," I say as I reach the steps. "We'll see about that," she says, grabbing my face and shining a pen light in my eyes. I slap it away. "Really? You're checking my pupils? Really?" "Hal said you looked hazy," she says, clipping the pen back on the neckline of her scrubs. "Hal? Who's Hal?" "Hal is the paramedic who took your signature when you declined medical treatment. He radioed in to the hospital after he left you." "Oh. Well, then Hal would have noticed I was just in an accident, so I might have been a little out of it. Doesn't mean I was high." So it wasn't small-town gossip, it was small-county gossip. Good ole Hal's probably transported hundreds of patients to my mom in the ER two towns over. She scowls. "Why didn't you call me? Who is Samantha?" I sigh and push past her. There's no reason to have this conversation on the porch. She follows me into the house. "She's Galen's sister. I didn't call because I didn't have a signal on my cell. We were on a dead road." "Where was Galen? Why were you driving his car?" "He was home. We were just taking it for a drive. He didn't want to come." Technically, all these statements are true, so they sound believable when I say them. Mom snorts and secures the dead bolt on the front door. "Probably because he knows his sister is life threatening behind the wheel." "Probably.

And I also have the impression—a bit inconsistent, Like a dream based on jumbled realities— That I left myself on a seat in the streetcar, To be found by whoever was going to sit down there next. And I also have the impression—a bit hazy, Like a dream one tries to remember on waking up to the dim light of dawn— That there’s something better in me than myself. Yes, I also have the impression—a bit painful, As of waking up without dreams to a day full of creditors— That I bungled everything, like tripping on a doormat, That I got everything wrong, like a suitcase without toilet articles, That I replaced myself with something at some point in my life.

Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.

We went to a movie, Marlboro Man and me, longing for the quiet time in the dark. We couldn’t find it anywhere else--my parents’ house was bustling with people and plans and presents, and Marlboro Man had some visiting cousins staying with him on the ranch. A dim movie theater was our only haven, and we took full advantage of being only one of two couples in the entire place. We reverted back to adolescence, unashamed, cuddling closer and closer as the movie picked up steam. I took it even further, draping my leg over his and resting my hand on his tan bicep. Marlboro Man’s arm reached across my waist as the temperature rose between us. Two days before our wedding, we were making out in a dark, hazy movie theater. It was one of the most romantic moments of my life.

Two days before our wedding, we were making out in a dark, hazy movie theater. It was one of the most romantic moments of my life. Until Marlboro Man’s whiskers scratched my sensitive face, and I winced in pain. When we returned to my parents’ house, Marlboro Man walked me to the door, his arm tightly around my waist. “You’d better get some sleep,” he said. My stomach jumped inside my body. “I know,” I said, stopping and holding him close. “I can’t believe it’s almost here.” “I’m glad you didn’t move to Chicago,” Marlboro Man whispered, chuckling the soft chuckle that started all this trouble in the first place. I remember being in that same spot, in that same position, the night Marlboro Man had asked me not to go. To stay and give us a chance. I still couldn’t believe we were here.

I do not wish to dwell on my analysis of the existential problem posed by Nietzsche in any detail. After all, if Nietzsche's definition of the problem is clear, the solutions he suggested are both hazy and dangerous — particularly in the case of his theory of the Übermensch and the will to power, and his naturalistic, almost physical praise of 'life'. To 'be oneself' and to follow one's own law as an absolute law can certainly be a positive and legitimate option — or, rather, the only remaining option: but this is true only in the case of the human type I addressed in Ride the Tiger: an individual possessing two natures, one 'personal' and one transcendent. The idea of 'being oneself', therefore — of achieving self-realization and of severing all bonds — will have a different meaning according to what nature it is that expresses it. Transcendence ('that which is more than life’), understood as a central and conscious element present within immanence ('life'), provides the foundation for the existential path I outlined — a path that includes elements such as: 'Apollonian Dionysism' (i.e., an opening towards the most intense and diverse aspects of life, here experienced through the lucid inebriation brought about by the presence of a superior principle), impersonal activism (pure action that transcends good and evil, prospects of success or failure, happiness and unhappiness) and the challenging of oneself without any fear that the 'I' might suffer (internal invulnerability). The origin of some of these ideas should be self-evident to those who have followed my discussion so far.

If you care so much about it,” she asks him, “then why did you run?” He takes a moment before answering, shifting his weight and grimacing again. “Their work is good,” he says. “It just isn’t mine.” This baffles her. His motives—his hazy integrity. It was easy to dismiss Lev as “part of the problem” when she did not know him, but now it’s not so easy. He’s a paradox. This is a boy who almost blew himself to bits in an attempt to kill others, and yet he offered himself to the parts pirate in order to save Miracolina’s life. How could someone go from having no respect for one’s own existence to being willing to give himself as a sacrifice for someone he barely knows? It flies in the face of the truths that have defined Miracolina’s life. The bad are bad, the good are good, and being caught in between is just an illusion. There is no gray.

An hour after they’d left the clearing, a heavy layer of fog filled the valley like a moist blanket. The trees grew into amorphous shapes, mountains gone. Ash stopped dead in his tracks. He stared into the forest with wide eyes. “Whoa! D’you see that?!” Vale jerked to a stop. “What? Where?!” “There in the trees.” He pointed into the forest to where the rainy undergrowth grew thick with a hazy veil of grey-white mist. “The haze.” “What about it?” “Looks like game lag. But like… real lag. Real life lag.” Ash grinned at her, his brown eyes sparkling. “Like the forest is supposed to be there, but it’s not totally loaded by the computer yet.” “That’s going to be trouble.” “Why?” Vale nodded to where Ash knew the mountaintops should be, but were no longer visible, caught in an otherworldly lag. “It means we can’t see the mountains.” “So?” “So we can’t see where we are going anymore.” Ash frowned. “Er… yeah.” “C’mon. Let’s keep walking.

Instinctively, my eyes clasped on Amar’s. He was shocked, his face pale. He grabbed me; his hands entangled in my hair even as my fingers were wrapped around the hilt that destroyed him. “I love you, jaani. My soul could never forget you. It would retrace every step until it found you.” He looked at me, his dark eyes dulling, as if all the love that had once lit them to black mirrors was slowly disappearing. “Save me.” The glow of the candles cast pools of light onto the ground, illuminating his profile. I knew, now, why Nritti begged me not to look at him. His gaze unlocked something in me. It was both visceral and ephemeral, like heavy light. The eyes of death revealed every recess of the soul and every locked-away memory of my past and present life converged into one gaze… I was weightless, my vison unfocused and hazy until the memory of the woman in the glass garden engulfed me. Slowly, the woman turned and a wave of shock shot through me--I was staring at myself.

You care about her," I say with unexpected twang of envy. In my long-lost memories of us as children, it was always just the two of us. We 'got' each other on every level. Morpheus made me feel adored, special, important. I never considered him doing the same for someone else as a man. "Morpheus, what is she to you?" He doesn't answer. Not aloud, anyway. His expression is hazy and troubled, and the jewels around his eyes twinkle from silver to black, like stars peering down on a storm-swept night. Alice's confession from the trial comes back to me: "Ivory was, in fact, very fond of Mr. Caterpillar." Judging by how Morpheus looked at the queen just now, by how she looked at him, he returned to her castle after his metamorphosis. I imagine his elegant fingers tracing her skin, his soft lips on hers. That stab of envy evolves to something much uglier—a covetous twist of emotion I can't even put a name to. What's wrong with me? Why should i care about Morpheus's love life, when I finally kissed Jeb after all these years?

I know I will not find us lying beneath the stars. We won’t be walking through the sunflower fields. We won’t fall in love with the sun rise, or kiss in the afternoon. Maybe I’ll miss you, and then I’ll cry for you. And when I’ll miss you, I’ll look for you on my bookshelf. You’ll be there in between four hundred pages. Maybe covered in dust, maybe stained with tears, I’ll wipe it with my yellow t-shirt, The one I wore on October first. But no matter how much I cry, with a broken heart, on a Saturday night. I’ll grab the book close to my heart. Then I’ll close my hazy eyes and see you smile under clear sky. I’ll stay an old soul and you’ll stay my vintage dream. A dream that will bring me back to life like a fantasy novel, and break my heart like a dead poetry. I’ll open my eyes, the illusions will be destroyed. But no matter how much I cry. About you, I’ll never write. This isn’t our song. But years later, on a winter night, if ever, you’ll call it our song. Then believe me, in a blink, I’ll call it a love song.

Because totalitarian rule strives for the impossible and wants to place at its disposal the personality of man and destiny, it can be realized only in a fragmentary manner. It lies in its being that its goal can never be attained and made total but must remain a tendency, a claim to rule. . . . Totalitarian rule is not a thoroughly rationalized apparatus, that works with equal effectiveness in all its parts. This is something it would well like to be and in some places it may perhaps approach this ideal, but seen as a whole, its claim to power is realizable only in a diffuse manner, with very different intensities at various times in various realms of life; at the same time, totalitarian and non-totalitarian features are always commingled. But this is precisely why the consequences of the totalitarian claim to power are so dangerous and oppressive, because they are so hazy, so incalculable, and so difficult to demonstrate. . . . This contortion follows from the unfulfillable aspiration to power: it characterizes life under such a regime and makes it so exceedingly difficult for all outsiders to grasp.

Learned and lovely,” he said. “I see now why you’ve been spending time with her, Falco. Just because she cannot be your bride doesn’t mean she cannot be your muse.” Cass’s good mood faded instantly. Even in the dingy taverna, the reality was obvious to everyone. She and Falco could never be together. “Let’s get out of here, my lovely muse,” Falco said, as if sensing that Paolo’s words had upset her. He pulled her chair back for her, and she stood and adjusted her skirts. Cass bid the other artists good night and let Falco lead her to the door. “Falco.” Paolo’s sharp voice cut through the hazy darkness. Falco turned around. “Yes?” “I trust she knows little of your line of work?” Cass felt Falco’s body tense up momentarily, and then relax. “We’ve spoken briefly about the work I do for Tommaso, if that’s what you mean.” Paolo stared at Falco without speaking. Nicolas and Etienne looked up as well. Cass could have sworn they were having an entire conversation without words. “Let’s go.” Falco broke the spell by turning away. He pulled Cass through the door and out into the night. “What was that about?” she asked, shivering in the damp air. Falco put an arm around her and pulled her close. “Who knows,” he said. “Paolo feels the need to make himself a pain to everybody. I just let him pretend he’s in charge.” Falco led Cass behind the bakery where a small batèla was tied. “Are you ready for our next adventure?” he asked, untying the ropes of the wooden rowboat as though he stole boats every night of his life. “Skulking about the outskirts of a few wealthy palazzos should be child’s play compared with some of the work we’ve done.

We are living in a fantastic time, brimming with opportunities and potential—both wonderful and terrible. We are posed on the brink of immortality—or extinction. Our path ahead is hazy—only we, today, right now—can make it clear. A new age awaits humanity and our terrestrial biosphere. Do we choose death and obscurity—or do we choose life and hope? Free space settlement offers the latter and our chance to achieve it has just gotten a lot easier.

So you’re saying, Jack, that death would be just as threatening even if you’d accomplished all you’d ever hoped to accomplish in your life and work.” “Are you crazy? Of course. That’s an elitist idea. Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?” “Well said.” “This is death. I don’t want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.” “Your status as a doomed man lends your words a certain prestige and authority. I like that. As the time nears, I think you’ll find that people will be eager to hear what you have to say. They will seek you out.” “Are you saying this is a wonderful opportunity for me to win friends?” “I’m saying you can’t let down the living by slipping into self-pity and despair. People will depend on you to be brave. What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor. You’re growing in prestige even as we speak. You’re creating a hazy light about your own body. I have to like it.

The Witch stood on an isthmus connecting two rocky lands, and on either side of her stretch patches of cerulean blue sea, with white-lipped waves of astonishing vigor and particularity. The Witch held in her hands a beast of unrecognizable species, though it was clearly drowned, or nearly drowns. She cradled it in an arm that, without attention to actual skeletal flexibility, lovingly encircled the beast's wet, spiky-furred back. With her other hand she was freeing a breast from her robe, offering suck to the creature. Her expression was hard to read, or had the monk's hand smudged, or age and grime bestowed a sfumato sympathy? She was nearly motherly, with miserable child. Her look was inward, or sad, or something. But her feet didn't match her expression, for they were planted on the narrow strand with prehensile grip, apparent even through the silver-colored shoes, whose coin-of-the-realm brilliance had first caught Boq's eyes. Furthermore, the feet were turned out at ninety-degree angles to the shins. They showed in profile as mirror images, heels clicked together and toes pointing in opposite directions, like a stance in ballet. The gown was a hazy dawn blue.

Long Island is a great idea. The first night I’m there I eat popcorn for dinner and sit on the deck watching the waves reach their foamy hands out to me and invite me in. It’s still summer-warm but hazy, and the moonlight is diffused over the water. The limitlessness of the ocean beyond the horizon exhilarates me. I can’t see what’s just past that line, and if I swam out to it, there would be another line I wouldn’t be able to see past. I just know that what’s ahead of me is the rest of my life, starting with tonight. And then tomorrow.

I walked to the painting on the easel. It was an impression, not a lifelike rendering. 'I wanted you to see this one,' I said, pointing to the smear of green and gold and silver and blue. 'It's for you. A gift. For everything you've done.' Heat flared in my cheeks, my neck, my ears, as he silently approached the painting. 'It's the glen- with the pool of starlight,' I said quickly. 'I know what it is,' he murmured, studying the painting. I backed away a step, unable to bear watching him look at it, wishing I hadn't brought him in here, blaming it on the wine I'd had at dinner, on the stupid dress. He examined the painting for a miserable eternity, then looked away- to the nearest painting leaning against the wall. My gut tightened. A hazy landscape of snow and skeletal trees and nothing else. It looked like.... like nothing, I supposed, to anyone but me. I opened my mouth to explain, wishing I'd turned the others away from view, but he spoke. 'That was your forest. Where you hunted.' He came close to the painting, gazing at the bleak, empty cold, the white and grey and brown and black. 'This was your life,' he clarified. I was too mortified, too stunned, to reply. He walked to the next painting I'd left against the wall. Darkness and dense brown, flickers of ruby red and orange squeezing between them. 'Your cottage at night.' I tried to move, to tell him to stop looking at those ones and look at the others I'd laid out, but I couldn't- couldn't even breathe properly as he moved to the next painting. A tanned, sturdy male hand fisted in the hay, the pale pieces of it entwined among strands of brown coated with gold- my hair. My gut twisted. 'The man you used to see- in your village.' He cocked his head again as he studied the picture, and a low growl slipped out. 'While you made love.' He stepped back, looking at the row of pictures. 'This is the only one with brightness.' Was that... jealousy? 'It was the only escape I had.' Truth. I wouldn't apologise for Issac. Not when Tamlin had just been in the Great Rite. I didn't hold that against him- but if he was going to be jealous of Issac- Tamlin must have realised it, too, for he loosed a long, controlled breath before moving to the next painting. Tall shadows of men, bright red dripping off their fists, off their wooden clubs, hovering and filling the edges of the painting as they towered over the curled figure on the floor, the blood leaking from him, the leg at a wrong angle. Tamlin swore. 'You were there when they wrecked your father's leg.' 'Someone had to beg them to stop.' Tamlin threw a too-knowing glance in my direction and turned to look at the rest of the paintings. There they were, all the wounds I'd slowly been leeching these few months. I blinked. A few months. Did my family believe that I would be forever away with this so-called dying aunt? At last, Tamlin looked at the painting of the glen and the starlight. He nodded in appreciation. But he pointed to the painting of the snow-veiled woods. 'That one. I want that one.' 'It's cold and melancholy,' I said, hiding my wince. 'It doesn't suit this place at all.' He went up to it, and the smile he gave me was more beautiful than any enchanted meadow or pool of stars. 'I want it nonetheless,' he said softly.

As traditional sacrifices faded from collective memory, later Christians became hazy about what ancient teachers meant by the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifices of Christian life. We haven’t repudiated these ways of describing our salvation, since they are firmly rooted in our tradition. Yet, at least in the Eastern Orthodox Church, our focus has shifted toward other, more familiar metaphors: defeat of the devil, invasion of Hades, liberation of captives.

You're drunk?" "Not on your life." His smile is hazy though. "You're totally drunk," I crow. "So are you," he counters. "Maybe so." I shiver and rub my arms. "That coat is too thin." "Don't growl at me. It's perfectly fine. It's just windy up here." "Take mine." He's already shrugging out of it. "No, no. I don't need—" "Take it." He reaches around to settle the overcoat over my shoulders.

Orlando had become a woman--there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory--but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he'--her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

Orlando had become a woman--there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory--but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he'--her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

heaven was so real and so lucid and so utterly intense, it made my experiences on Earth seem hazy and out of focus—as if heaven is the reality and life as we know it is just a dream. .

THIS BOOK LOOKS at how we make sense of the world. It’s about what happens when we’re confused and the path forward isn’t obvious. Of course, most of the challenges of daily life are perfectly straightforward. When it’s snowing, we know to put on a jacket before venturing out. When the phone rings, we pick it up. A red stoplight means we should brake. At the other end of the spectrum, vast stores of knowledge completely confound most of us. Stare at Babylonian cuneiform or listen to particle physicists debate, and if you’re like me, your mind will draw a blank. We can’t be confused without some foothold in knowledge. Instead of feeling uneasy because we half understand, we’re as calmly certain in our ignorance as we are assured in our everyday rituals. This book examines the hazy middle ground between these two extremes, when the information we need to make sense of an experience seems to be missing, too complex, or contradictory.

There must be a clear distinction between wishing and believing. A wish is a hazy thread of desires that leaves room for the winds of doubt to toss it about, meaning it might happen by chance or not. A belief has no equivocation; it is clear, stubborn and deliberate in taking hold of what remains yet unseen by the physical eye. If there is no visible way, a belief will draft the way, create the way, walk the path and reach the desired destination.

Angela’s wall appeared whenever she felt anxious, often after someone was “too nice” to her, or when she was very angry and feared a loss of self-control. Behind the wall she felt protected, but at a price, because the wall made her feel distant from people and not a part of life. Her earliest memory of the wall-like experience was at age five, when she started school and was frightened to be close to the other children lest she throw something at them. During that year she began to feel there was a large hazy circular space all around her. Once this sensation began, Angela felt paralyzed and unable to move or to respond. Her increasing social withdrawal apparently went unnoticed. She began to feel she was “an idea in someone else’s head.

Amid the material comforts and the relentless distractions of modern life, the universe at large may appear remote, intangible and irrelevant, especially to those of us who are city dwellers. But the next time you catch a glimpse of the Milky Way in its true glory, from a dark outpost far from city lights, think of those countless stars as nuclear factories and the starless hazy patches as molecular breweries. It is not much of a stretch to imagine

If we are confused or hazy in our thinking about prayer, and how to ensure its correct place in our life, we are bound to fail in achieving its proper priority. If we do not inject a fair amount of discipline into our life, we will be unable to control the contrary elements that continually militate against prayer.

As the lines on the palm and forehead … turned darker and thicker, as he matured along the highs and lows of life-wave, the hazy and blurred phrases shook off the dust of time and dried the moisture of pain, thus being vivid like an image on a carved glass. The incidences in his life ahead sharpened the blunt edges of diamond and the hitherto blurred prophecies found meaning… found reflection… like that in a mirror.

In the traitor lands, there were sacrifices every new moon, and you were lucky if the lord slit your throat before he gave you to his master. Even in the caves, leaders had cracked. Joan listened to the three girls discuss “character” very seriously and tried not to laugh or roll her eyes. You idiots, she thought. Does it matter where your prince put his hands? There’s no blood on them. Except that they did care because they could. Because they’d never known anyone worse. Tyrants were hazy figures from history. If this was a land, maybe a time, in the summer of its life, these were women in the summer of theirs. Their voices held no desperation, no need to hurry, no real fear. Earnestness, yes, and lots of it, but they gave a damn because they chose to, not because they had to. Even

Labor Day. We could hear their bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman's trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail underfoot crunched with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses.

What defines you? Is it those hazy memories of yesterday, or last year, or childhood? Is it the emotions and thoughts that are passing through you in this very moment? Is it the future where you achieve or even fail to achieve the goals you set? Or are you defined by something bigger than all that? Something that is beyond the change, beyond the fluctuations of your life? To practice mindfulness is to see that it is your changeless nature that truly defines you, rather than the ebb and flow of your emotional tides or the shifting directions of your thought streams.

But that's why you're upset now. Fiction is not life.' 'You don't believe that.' 'I think I do.' 'You know as well as I do that the line can't be drawn, that we're infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it's inescapable.' 'Don't be a sophist,' he said. 'There is a world and it's palpable.' 'I don't mean that,' I said. 'I mean that it's hard really to see it, that it's all hazy with out dreams and fantasies.

She’s so beautiful in the sun, and so smart, like one of her photos brought to life. All hazy light and wisps of hair and knowing glances. I want her for myself.

Later on in life, I would come to understand that the haziness in his gaze was desire.

It really was a bit of fever. If sin existed, she had sinned. All her life had been an error, she was futile. Where was the woman with the voice? Where were the women who were just female? And what about the continuation of what she had begun as a child? It was a bit of fever. The result of those days wandering here and there, repudiating and loving the same things a thousand times over. Of those nights living on dark and silent, the tiny stars winking up high. The woman lying on the bed, vigilant eye in the half-light. The hazy white bed swimming in darkness. Tiredness slithering through her body, lucidity fleeing the octopus. Frayed dreams, beginnings of visions. Otávio living in the other bedroom. And suddenly all the lassitude of waiting concentrating itself into a quick, nervous body movement, a silent scream. Cold then, and sleep.

Ava. Do you love him?” A lot of things in my life had been hazy up to this point, but my feelings about this were clear. I didn’t hesitate before answering. “Yes.” I may not know what was in my mind, but I knew what was in my heart. “I do.

fairytales aren’t forever. Reality would seep through the hazy dreamlike way she was around Colt. With no concerts to perform or contracts to contend with. Cheyenne had a life outside of Cut and Shoot. Jamison needed to have one too.

them entertained and supplied with a surfeit of horseflesh. But none to really worry about. Their source of food and sustenance, the buffalo, roamed the plains in record numbers and still ranged into every corner of Comancheria. The tribe’s low birth rates virtually guaranteed that their nomadic life following buffalo herds was infinitely sustainable. Their world was thus suspended in what seemed to be a perfect equilibrium, a balance of earth and wind and sun and sky that would endure forever. An empire under the bright summer moon. For those who witnessed the change at a very intimate and personal level, including Cynthia Ann and her husband, the speed with which that ideal world was dismantled must have seemed scarcely believable. She herself, the daughter of pioneers who were hammering violently at the age-old Comanche barrier that had defeated all other comers, now adopted into a culture that was beginning to die, was the emblem of the change. Somehow she and her husband, Peta Nocona, survived the cataclysm. As nomads, they moved constantly. One imagines her on one of these migrations, on horseback, moving slowly across the open grassy plain with hundreds of others, warriors in the vanguard, toward a wide, hazy horizon that would have looked to white men like unalloyed emptiness. There were the long trains of heavily packed mules and horses and the ubiquitous Comanche dogs. There were horses dragging travois that carried the huge tent poles and piled buffalo hides and scored the earth as they went along—perfectly parallel lines drawn on the prairie, merging and vanishing into the pale-blue Texas sky. All trailed by the enormous horse remuda, the source of their wealth. It must have been something to behold. Cynthia Ann lived a hard life. Women did all of the brutally hard work, including most of the work that went into moving camp. They did it from dawn till dark, led brief difficult lives, and did not complain about it; they did everything except hunt and fight. Her camp locations show just how far she roamed. Pah-hah-yuco’s camps were found in 1843 north of the Red River and south of modern-day Lawton, Oklahoma, on Cache Creek (the encampment was on a creek bank on the open prairie and stretched for half a mile).25 In 1844 he was camped on the Salt Plains of present-day north-central Oklahoma, on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River,26 well north of the Washita, where Williams found him in 1846. In 1847 his band was spotted a hundred miles north of Austin, in rolling, lightly timbered prairie, camped in a village of one hundred fifty lodges,27 and again that same year in a village in the limestone hills and mesas west of Austin. She was identified as being with the Tennawish band in 1847, who often camped with the Penateka (with whom Pah-hah-yuco was often

It’s like living underwater while wearing heavy shoes. Everything around you is hazy, unfamiliar, and heavy. It’s hard to move or function naturally. You feel fatigued as you push against the viscosity of the water. You feel the pressure of the depth and the lack of oxygen to breathe. Your eyes burn with the salty water, but you keep trying to find your way, totally exhausted and performing below your best. As harsh as this definition sounds, it’s very close to how we go through life while being totally unaware.

Part of her wished she could push the bars out of her way and walk out into the storm and get absolutely soaked to the bone and walk for miles in the nothing until the rain overtook her. She wanted to walk into the flood and let it sweep her away. She'd forgotten what it was like for everything to be muffled and distant and hazy despite the fact she'd spent so much of her life that way. It had been easier.

The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink. The almost certain consequences that follow taking even a glass of beer do not crowd into the mind to deter us. If these thoughts occur, they are hazy and readily supplanted with the old threadbare idea that this time we shall handle ourselves like other people. There is a complete failure of the kind of defense that keeps one from putting his hand on a hot stove. The alcoholic may say to himself in the most casual way, “It won’t burn me this time, so here’s how!” Or perhaps he doesn’t think at all. How often have some of us begun to drink in this nonchalant way, and after the third or fourth, pounded on the bar and said to ourselves, “For God’s sake, how did I ever get started again?” Only to have that thought supplanted by “Well, I’ll stop with the sixth drink.” Or “What’s the use anyhow?” When this sort of thinking is fully established in an individual with alcoholic tendencies, he has probably placed himself beyond human aid, and unless locked up, may die or go permanently insane. These stark and ugly facts have been confirmed by legions of alcoholics throughout history. But for the grace of God, there would have been thousands more convincing demonstrations. So many want to stop but cannot. There is a solution. Almost none of us liked the self-searching, the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation. But we saw that it really worked in others, and we had come to believe in the hopelessness and futility of life as we had been living it. When, therefore, we were approached by those in whom the problem had been solved, there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet. We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed. The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences* which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God’s universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves. If you are as seriously alcoholic as we were, we believe there is no middle-of-the-road solution. We were in a position where life was becoming impossible, and if we had passed into the region from which there is no return through human aid, we had but two alternatives: One was to go on to the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation as best we could; and the other, to accept spiritual help. This we did because we honestly wanted to, and were willing to make the effort.