Middle Of Nowhere Quotes

Where are you going?" I asked. "The middle of nowhere." "I thought this was it." "Nah." You shook your head. "This is just the edge.

Let's take a drive into the middle of nowhere with a packet of Marlboro lights and talk about our lives.

Sorry,” he mumbled. “You should be!” Zoe snapped. “You scared the hell out of me and now I’m about to give birth to two Bradfords out in the middle of nowhere with no drugs! Do you have any idea how big a Bradford head is? Huh? Do you?

We so seldom understand each other. But if understanding is neither here nor there, and the universe is infinite, then understand that no matter where we go we will always be smack dab in the middle of nowhere. All we can do is share some piece of ourselves, and hope that it’s remembered. Hope that we meant something to someone

But for the most part, magic tends to end in explosions, or tears, or with you flat on your back in the middle of nowhere, feeling like a tiny dwarf is mining for diamonds inside your head. Okay, so maybe that last bit was just me.

Have you ever seen The Last of the Mohicans?" "I love it." "Really?" I'm over the moon. We share a movie. Finally, we're on the same planet. "Don't you love the part where he says, 'Stay alive. I will find you'?" I ask. "I love that massacre scene," he says, like an excited little boy, "where they're walking down that path in the middle of nowhere and they're surrounded by the woods and you know the Indians are going to attack and it's so tense." Things that make you go hmmm.

I am not happy. I am not unhappy. I am frozen somewhere in the middle that is so much worse. I am nowhere. Nothing is happening and I am getting more and more sad.

There’s a kid in the middle of nowhere who’s sitting there living for Tony performances. Singing and flipping along with the Pippins, and Wickeds, and Kinkys, Matildas, and Mormons's. So we might reassure that kid, and do something to spur that kid, ‘cause I promise you, all of us up here tonight, we were that kid.

If you want to be happy, you have to let go of the part of you that wants to create melodrama. This is the part that thinks there’s a reason not to be happy. You have to transcend the personal, and as you do, you will naturally awaken to the higher aspects of your being. In the end, enjoying life’s experiences is the only rational thing to do. You’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Go ahead, take a look at reality. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you have to be here, at least be happy and enjoy the experience. You’re going to die anyway. Things are going to happen anyway. Why shouldn’t you be happy? You gain nothing by being bothered by life’s events. It doesn’t change the world; you just suffer. There’s always going to be something that can bother you, if you let it.

District 12. Where you can starve to death in safety," I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you.

In the end, the train stood 2 hours motionless in the middle of nowhere. Every minute seemed like an eternity. Time felt crept by slowly, with clear malice towards me. All I could do was grip my teeth and try to hold back my tears... Akari... Please, don't wait for me... If you'd just go home.

Get out!" He dodges the pillow I throw at him. "Go away! There's nothing left for you here!" I start to shake, furious with him. "She's not coming back! She's never ever coming back here again!" I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. "She's dead." I clutch my middle to dull the pain. Sink down on my heels, rocking the pillow, crying. "She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead.

Lone women shouldn't stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.

But he was also the boy who’d shown up on her class field trip and shown her where she really belonged. The one who’d let her cry on his shoulder when she had to leave her family, and who’d gone out searching for her in the middle of nowhere, just because he’d heard her voice in his head.

Apollo was still a no-show and the cabin out in the middle of nowhere had become a god-free zone. A good thing, but I figured one would just pop in, most likely in Deacon's bed or something, where we'd least expect them.

She dug in her backpack, found her cell phone, and checked for coverage. It was kind of lame in Morganville, truthfully, out in the middle of the prarie, in the middle of Texas, which was about as middle of nowhere as it was possible to get unless you wanted to go to Mongolia or something.... Claire started dialing numbers. The first person told her that they'd already found somebody.... The second one sounded like a weird old guy. The third one was a weird old lady. The fourth one... well, the fourth one was just plain weird.

Home. The word caught and settled, deep in my chest. But home wasn’t Korvius, or the Towers, or even a cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by flowers. Home was a pair of mismatched eyes, an accented voice, and a heartbeat that followed the same cadence as mine. And I was so, so homesick.

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos. What it's going to be, I don't know. Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And maybe knowing isn't the point. Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

If you’re a kid who was not especially a star in your high school, I recommend going to a college in the middle of nowhere. I got all the attention I could ever have wanted.

I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.

You're a virgin. You have no idea what you're asking for." "Then you will have to teach me." "Not like this. Not on a horse in the middle of nowhere.

In the middle of nowhere, along a quiet stretch of road, the diner dreamt of the hungry dead. And of two men.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

In the middle of nowhere, an old wooden bridge is a golden bridge!

…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them

You can start by wiping that fucking dumb-ass smile off your rosey, fucking, cheeks! Then you can give me a fucking automobile... a fucking Datsun, a fucking Toyota, a fucking Mustang, a fucking Buick! Four fucking wheels and a seat! And I really don't care for the way your company left me in the middle of fucking nowhere with fucking keys to a fucking car that isn't fucking there. And I really didn't care to fucking walk down a fucking highway and across a fucking runway to get back here to have you smile at my fucking face. I want a fucking car RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

You need to be able to feel proud of yourself even if you were living in a tiny hut in the middle of nowhere, taking care of goats.

Hello, there should be more advice about dealing with depression when you're stupid and worthless, so here is a self help exercise. Today's assignment is simple. Just go out and get on the bus. It doesn't matter which bus. Whichever bus comes next. Get on, and just go. You could ride that bus to the very end, thank the driver, and then walk into the woods and just die. Just lay down right there and wait and wait until you were dead. Who is going to miss you? Really, think about it. If you went out to the middle of nowhere and just sat down in a ditch and cried by yourself until you were dead, who would be the first person to wonder where you'd gone? Call them up! Maybe they want to get ice cream?

Whenever I hear the word danger, I see Marlena and me staring into the mouth of that U-Haul in the winter hour between twilight and dark. Two girls full of plans, fifteen and seventeen years old in the middle of nowhere. Stop, I want to tell us. Stay right where you are, together. Don't move. But we will. We always do. The clock's already running.

In the meantime, I’ll wish it upon a star.'- Michael Cooper

New York City is a place where everyone lived on top of each other, and that was exactly how Sabrina liked it. Living out in the middle of nowhere was dangerous and suspicious.

When he closed his eyes, everything around him just felt empty and cold, as if he was in the loneliest place in the world. The middle of nowhere.

I started to put my phone back in my bag when Ozzy yelled out, his accent so thick, I was only half certain he said, "Where the foock are ya goin'?" Uncle Bob jumped. I must've turned on my GPS. "You have to tahn the foock around. You're in the middle of foockin' nowhere." "What the hell is that?" Uncle Bob asked, almost swerving off the road. "Sorry, it's Ozzy." I grabbed my phone and turned down the volume. "He's so demanding." I pushed a few buttons to turn off the app, then put the phone to my ear. "Sweet, buttermilk pancakes, Ozzy, you have to stop calling me. You're a married man!" I pretended to hang up, then rolled my eyes. "Rock stars.

To get some distance from this, you first need to get some perspective. Walk outside on a clear night and just look up into the sky. You are sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Though you can only see a few thousand stars, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. In fact, it is estimated that there are over a trillion stars in the Spiral Galaxy. And that galaxy would look like one star to us, if we could even see it. You’re just standing on one little ball of dirt and spinning around one of the stars. From that perspective, do you really care what people think about your clothes or your car? Do you really need to feel embarrassed if you forget someone’s name? How can you let these meaningless things cause pain? If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your life worrying about whether people like you or whether your car impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain. You may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend your life avoiding pain means it’s always right behind you.

No, dude, I’m working at a shitty gas station in the middle of nowhere and I’m perfectly happy being miserable until I die. Good day, sir.

But, dear God, don't listen to me. I'm an old lady in the middle of nowhere without a real toilet.

Maybe, someday we all will come out of those beautiful and warm shelters we have built around us and open our arms to the storms, smiling at them. Maybe, we all will finally let them take us all and throw in the middle of nowhere. Where nobody knows each other anymore, and we are all strangers again.

Ralston didn't care. He turned on his brother as the surgeon knelt next to him and inspected the wound. "She could have been killed!" And what about you?" This time, it was Callie who spoke, her own pent-up energy releasing in anger, and the men turned as one to look at her, surprised that she and found her voice. "What about you and your idiotic pland to somehow restore my honor by playing guns out in the middle of nowhere with OXFORD?" She said the baron's name in disdain. "Like children? Of all the ridiculous, unnecessary, thoughtless, MALE things to do...who even FIGHTS duels anymore?!

Why do guys do that?" I ask. "Name their vehicles." "Ownership." He grins. I reach over and punch him lightly. "What?" he protests. "It's true! And it gives us something to swear when we break down in the middle of nowhere.

At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Indiana Jones and the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, coming never to a theater near you.

Albacete (AL-ba-seet) n. A single surprisingly long hair growing in the middle of nowhere.

Wallace wondered what it said about his life (and death) that he’d ended up in a kitchen in a lopsided house in the middle of nowhere wearing nothing but a bikini.

If you see a lonely tree in the middle of nowhere, plant a tree next to it! ~

There's no such thing as the middle of nowhere. Something is happening everywhere. You just have to find the story in it.

Just because you live in the middle of nowhere, doesn't know you can't know where you live.

Say you’re in the middle of nowhere, nobody for miles and no hope of rescue. You sit down and start playing solitaire and somebody will immediately come along and tell you to play the red eight on the black nine.

THERE ARE LOW points, and there are low points. This-rattling down an endless stretch of interstate in a Greyhound bus toward the middle of farm-country-nowhere a week after barely graduating high school-was my low point.

there is always, always the other road to choose, even if it seems to be nothing more than an unpaved path in the middle of nowhere?

So here I am, a crazy old warrior following a crazy young man and a crazy grey wolf into the middle of nowhere in the mountains, on a hunt for you.

Cops were distrustful; they always wanted to know why you decided to dig a hole in the middle of nowhere.

Every morning in the middle of nowhere, without electricity or anyone to impress, I'd take great care in picking out my outfit and hover in front of a business card-size mirror to apply my lip gloss and check my eyebrows. I also felt I had a strong case for bringing a little black dress on expeditions. Village parties spring up more often than you might expect, and despite never having been a Girl Scout, I like to be prepared.

Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean?" ...in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid.

<…>Tate fell silent. Ty didn't. "Since the day I was released, you knocked yourself out. You had my back, you took care of Lexie when we had our thing then you did what you could to help me sort that. It's important to me that you know I'm grateful. I've been tryin' to figure out how I can show how much but, keep thinkin' on it, nothin' comes to mind and I know why. I get it. You're a man who has everything so there is nothing I can hand you that you want or need. And I get that because I am now that same man. So the only thing I can give you are words and, my guess is, that'll be enough. If it isn't, you name it and it's yours." "Friends do what I did for friends," Tate returned. "No they don't, Tate. You did what you did for me because you're you. That's what I'm talkin' about." Tate ws silent a moment then he said, "Well then, you guessed right. Words are enough." Ty nodded. Tate tipped his head to the side and asked jokingly, "We done with the near-midnight in the middle of fuckin' nowhere heart-to-heart?" Ty didn't feel like joking and answered, "No." "Then what -?" "Love you, man," Ty interrupted quietly. "Learned the hard way not to delay in expressing that sentiment so I'm not gonna delay. You call me brother and I got one who's blood who don't mean shit to me and today, all this shit done, rejoicing and reflecting, it hit me that I got two who aren't blood but who do mean something. And you're one of those two." "Ty-" Tate murmured. "I will never forget, until I die, what you did for me and my wife and until that day I will never stop bein' grateful." "Fuck man," Tate whispered. "Now, do those words work so you get what you did mean to me?" Silence then, "Yeah, they work." "Good, then now we're done with our near-midnight, middle of fuckin' nowhere heart-to-heart," Ty declared, turned, opened the door to the Viper and started folding in. He stopped with his ass nearly to the seat and looked up over the door when Tate called his name. "I don't have a blood brother," Tate said. "But you should know there's a reason I call you that."<…>

I know people always talk about living in the middle of nowhere—there’s always another place (some city, some foreign country) they’d rather be. But it’s moments like this that I feel like I live in the middle of somewhere. My somewhere.

We must redefine the American dream so that it does not rest on the assumption that we can throw old places away and create new ones in the middle of nowhere.

Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes, in the middle nowhere you find yourself." ~Unknown

Fuck me. This man was insanely hot, not someone I expected to come across out here. This was the middle of nowhere USA, not the Australian outback for Christ’s sake.

Your real secret hiding place is not a dark cave, it is not a dusky forest, it is not a desolate house in the middle of nowhere but your real secret hiding place is always your own mind! Every person ultimately hides himself over there, in his own mind!

Housing projects are a great metaphor for the government's relationship to poor folks: these huge islands built mostly in the middle of nowhere, designed to warehouse lives. People are still people, though, so we turned the projects into real communities, poor or not. We played in fire hydrants and had cookouts and partied, music bouncing off concrete walls. But even when we could shake off the full weight of those imposing buildings and try to just live, the truth of our lives and struggle was still invisible to the larger country. The rest of the country was freed of any obligation to claim us. Which was fine, because we weren't really claiming them, either.

Let me give you some advice here: People who want to have the sex talk with you will act the same way as people who want to murder you. First they get you in their car, so they're in control and you can't escape. Then they drive you someplace in the middle of nowhere.

Dan was doing his best Ian Kabra impersonation, looking around the store as though inspecting it for cockroaches. Amy tried to turn her snort of laughter into a cough. "Espresso?" The saleswoman materialized seemingly out of nowhere. Amy realized that the full-length mirror on the wall was actually a door. If she were Amy Cahill, she would blush and shake her head no, just because she didn't want to cause any bother. She imagined what Natalie Kabra would do. "Tea. Darjeeling," she said in a curt tone. "Oh, not Darjeeling, sis," Dan said. "That's just so middle class." "Lapsang souchong?" the saleswoman asked. "I just adored his last collection," Dan said. The woman's tight smile dimmed. "That's a tea.

He's come on foot then, all the way from 13. Maybe they kicked him out or maybe he just couldn't stand it there without her, so he came looking. "It was the waste of a trip. She's not here," I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. "She's not here. You can hiss all you like. You won't find Prim." At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow hopefully. "Get out!" He dodges the pillow I throw at him. "Go away! There's nothing left for you here!" I start to shake, furious with him. "She's not coming back! She's never ever coming back here again!" I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. "She's dead." I clutch my middle to dull the pain. Sink down on my heels, rocking the pillow, crying. "She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead.

And just like magic, the Isle of the Lost began to form before their eyes, including the hidden and forbidden zones. The Forbidden Fortress appeared, a menacing-looking castle of spiky walls and twisty towers, located on the edge of the island. Right in the middle of Nowhere.

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

We are all dying, aren’t we, Willow, from the very moment we are born?

You will find your Island here. But how can it be here in the middle of the city? -It needs no place. It is everywhere and nowhere. It refuses entry to none who asks. It is an Island of the Soul.

Be myself. If only I remembered what it was like to be myself. I’m a fucking waitress in a crappy bar in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I was going nowhere. I had nothing to give him beside myself and my heart and he denied me.

So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to be psychologically defended at all costs. We’re trapped in a story that sees ourselves as independent, isolated agents acting in the world. But that self is an illusion. It can be a useful illusion, when you’re swinging through the trees or escaping from a cheetah or trying to do your taxes. But at the systems level, there is no truth to it. You can take any number of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes, vehicles for passing on DNA; that we’re social creatures through and through, unable to survive alone; that we’re organisms in an ecosystem, linked together on this planet floating in the middle of nowhere. Wherever you look, you see that the level of interconnectedness is truly amazing, and yet we insist on thinking of ourselves as individual agents.” Albert Einstein called the modern human’s sense of separateness “a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

Life was about to take her away from here. Fro the place where she'd become herself. This sold little village that never changed but helped its inhabitants to change. She's arrived straight from art college full of avant-garde ideas, wearing shades of gray and seeing the world in black and white. So sure of herself. But here, in the middle of nowhere, she'd discovered color. And nuance. She'd learned this from the villagers, who'd been generous enough to lend her their souls to paint. Not as perfect human beings, but as flawed, struggling men and women. Filled with fear and uncertainty and, in at least one case, martinis.

It occurred to me. . .that aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution's highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us. But we do not stand apart from or above or in the middle of anything. There is nothing apart, nothing above, and the middle is everywhere - and nowhere. We are no more beautiful and essential or magnificent than an earthworm. In fact - and dare we go there, you and I? - you could say the worm is more beautiful, because it is innocent and we are not. The worm has no motive but to survive long enough to make baby worms. There is no betrayal, no cruelty, no envy, no lust, and no hatred in the worm's heart, and so who are the monsters and which species shall we call aberrant?

In the end, enjoying life’s experiences is the only rational thing to do. You’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere. You’re floating in empty space in a universe that goes on forever. If you're going to be here, be happy and enjoy the experience.

Now you, Sir, have a large tree, and you don’t know how to use it, so why not plant it in the middle of nowhere, where you can go to wander or fall asleep under its shade? No axe under Heaven will attack it, nor shorten its days, for something which is useless will never be disturbed.

Armor’s not dangerous. That’s for survival. It’s weapons you have to watch out for. And you—” He strokes my lips with his thumb. “It’s mostly armor, Colin. And when you’re with me, the armor falls away. Who you are without it… it’s beautiful.

Release my horse!" I ordered, infuriated with him and wary of both the large, energetic beast and its rider. "No," Steldor snapped. "You're coming back with me." Gripping my reins, he permitted his stallion to move forward in the direction of the city, my mount obediently following. Unwilling to give in to him, I slid from my horse's back. "I don't think I will return just yet, Your Majesty." With an exasperated sigh, he dismounted and strode toward me.As he did, he took in my preposterous appearance. "What are you doing?" he demanded, stopping in his tracks. "You're out in the middle of nowhere, by yourself, dressed like a man and riding your father's horse! Have you gone mad, woman?" He continued to scrutinize me, and his incredulity transformed itself into a frown. "And just where did you get the belt and breeches?" As realizatin struck, he sarcastically added, "Just my luck that you would decide to get into my trousers when I wasn't there yo enjoy it." My cheeks burned at his crude comment, and had I been a little closer, I would likely have dealt him a second slap. At the same time, I knew his assessment was accurate. "I was just going for a ride.I have the right to some fresh air," I asserted, hands upon my hips. Steldor gave a short, scathing laugh. "Not like this you don't.Now get on your horse.

For with love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light and, alas, the blackest despair.

Aw, he’s in love,” Hagema cooed. “Just stop,” Antero protested. “Though I will admit she is beautiful. And she can sing. But I can’t believe she just threatened the king in front of all these people. Pure suicide.” “Damn it! That takes real ox balls! I would’ve been here sooner if this hellhole wasn’t in the middle of fuxing nowhere!” Hagema ranted.

If you feel like a nearly-drowned rat that’s been dragged through the mud, all twisted up inside your mother’s borrowed, prized quilt, having been tossed about by gale force winds that managed to entangle you in barbed wire one-thousand miles from your goal in the middle of a hot, barren nowhere void of any basic necessities―then congratulations! You’re no observer but an actual participant in the game of life! Stand up and keep living.

I've told you two things : First, you're much more insignificant than you ever imagined and second, the future is miserable. But you should be happy, because we may live in a universe without purpose but that means the purpose in our lives is the purpose we create. And we should consider ourselves fortunate to have evolved in this place in the middle of nowhere and evolved a consciousness so we can understand the universe from the earliest moments of the big bang to the far future. So instead of being depressed, you should enjoy your brief moment in the sun.

But I awoke at three, feeling terribly sad, and feeling rebelliously that I didn't want to study sadness, madness, melancholy, and despair. I wanted to study triumphs, the rediscoveries of love, all that I know in the world to be decent, radiant, and clear. Then the word "love", the impulse to love, welled up in me somewhere above my middle. Love seemed to flow from me in all directions, abundant as water--love for Cora, love for Flora, love for all my friends and neighbors, love for Penumbra. This tremendous flow of vitality could not be contained within its spelling, and I seemed to seize a laundry marker and write "luve" on the wall. I wrote "luve" on the staircase, "luve" on the pantry, "luve" on the oven, the washing machine, and the coffeepot, and when Cora came down in the morning (I would be nowhere around) everywhere she looked she would read "luve", "luve", "luve." Then I saw a green meadow and a sparkling stream. On the ridge there were thatched-roof cottages and a square church tower, so I knew it must be England. I climbed up from the meadow to the streets of the village, looking for the cottage where Cora and Flora would be waiting for me. There seemed to have been some mistake. No one knew their names. I asked at the post office, but the answer here was the same. Then it occurred to me that they would be at the manor house. How stupid I had been! I left the village and walked up a sloping lawn to a Georgian house, where a butler let me in. The squire was entertaining. There were twenty-five or thirty people in the hall, drinking sherry. I took a glass from a tray and looked through the gathering for Flora and my wife, but they were not there. Then I thanked my host and walked down the broad lawn, back to the meadow and the sparkling brook, where I lay on the grass and fell into a sweet sleep.

It was during those years that I discovered that loving [my father] was like sticking a blade into my own heart. It got me nowhere, except awake in the middle of the night, recalling the years when my father was the strongest, the smartest, the funniest, and I lay curled in my bed, wondering why I had been cheated out of a father who loved me, and one I could love in return.

And now she was found, no longer lost. Like a bag I'd given up for good suddenly reappearing in the middle of the night on my doorstep, packed for a journey I'd long ago forgotten. It was odd, considering I'd gotten accustomed to her being nowhere and anywhere, to finally know where my mother was. An exact location, pinpointed. Like she'd crossed over from my imagination, where I'd created a million different lives for her, back into this one.

Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony [Iommi] put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of f**king nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the f**king thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly. ‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door. ‘Oh, thank f**k,’ I said. [...] ‘Halløj?’ I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?'

I just sit. Or I walk and walk. Or I stand somewhere looking at one spot. And it seems to me as I stand here that I am totally disconnected from the rest of the world around me. Nothing, absolutely nothing connects me with it. The world around me goes on being busy, conducts its wars, enslaves countries, kills people, tortures. The real world... My life till now seems to have slipped through this real world without participating in it, without caring about it, without any connection to it. Even when I was in the very middle of it, I wasn't really there. My only life connection is in these scribbles. Here I stand, this moment, now, with my arms hanging down, the shoulders fallen, eyes on the floor, beginning my life from point zero. I don't want to connect myself to this world. I am searching for another world to which it would be worth connecting myself.

Coming so close to death as a young child, only to resurface again into your life, imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness, a cavalier or even crazed attitude to risk. It could, I can see, have gone the other way, and made me into a person hindered by fear, hobbled by caution. Instead, I leapt off harbour walls. I walked alone in remote mountains. I took night trains through Europe on my own, arriving in capital cities in the middle of the night with nowhere to stay.

Where you can starve to death in safety,” I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, even in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you. When I was younger, I scared my mother to death, the things I would blurt out about District 12, about the people who rule our country, Panem, from the far-off city called the Capitol. Eventually I understood this would only lead us to more trouble. So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts. Do my work quietly in school. Make only polite small talk in the public market. Discuss little more than trades in the Hob, which is the black market where I make most of my money. Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food

I wish I could hold time in my hands. I wish I could talk to it. Oh, how I would ask it to give me just a few more increments of its elusive power. How can something we can’t touch or see have so much control over our lives. It was time that took you too soon, too young, before I got to say all of the things I wanted to, needed to. Things you will never know. And I carry them like a weight, these words, these sentences, right in the middle of my chest, because they have nowhere else to go. If only time had allowed me to understand the things I would want to say after you were gone. That’s the thing. They told me “don’t leave anything unsaid.” But I didn’t know what I wanted to say until it was too late, until you were gone. It was the time afterward that held all the wisdom.

The best answer I’ve heard came in a sermon given by an elderly priest many years ago. He was traveling in the Middle East and was overwhelmed by the majesty of the Persian rugs he saw. Those gorgeous creations so skillfully woven into such beautiful designs. One day he was in a shop where those rugs were on display. He walked behind one that was hanging on hooks from the ceiling. Looking at it from behind, he was shocked to behold a confusing array of threads that led nowhere. Such beauty on one side, total disharmony on the other, but both part of the same plan. It was then that the message became clear to him. In this life we see only the back side of the rug. We don’t know how or why our unspeakable hardships are part of a beautiful design. That is why having faith is so important.

The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hirther Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwannaland, Lhasas, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be . At any rate it out to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. (leter 53)

I think of the beauty in the obvious, the way it forces us to admit how it exists, the way it insists on being pointed out like a bloody nose, or how every time it snows there is always someone around to say, “It’s snowing.” But the obvious isn’t showing off, it’s only reminding us that time passes, and that somewhere along the way we grow up. Not perfect, but up and out. It teaches us something about time, that we are all ticking and tocking, walking the fine line between days and weeks, as if each second speaks of years, and each month has years listening to forever but never hearing anything beyond centuries swallowed up by millenniums, as if time was calculating the sums needed to fill the empty belly of eternity. We so seldom understand each other. But if understanding is neither here nor there, and the universe is infinite, then understand that no matter where we go, we will always be smack dab in the middle of nowhere. All we can do is share some piece of ourselves and hope that it’s remembered. Hope that we meant something to someone. My chest is a cannon that I have used to take aim and shoot my heart upon this world. I love the way an uncurled fist becomes a hand again, because when I take notes, I need it to underline the important parts of you: happy, sad, lovely. Battle cry ballistic like a disaster or a lipstick earthquaking and taking out the monuments of all my hollow yesterdays. We’ll always have the obvious. It reminds us who, and where we are, it lives like a heart shape, like a jar that we hand to others and ask, “Can you open this for me?” We always get the same answer: “Not without breaking it.” More often than sometimes, I say go for it.

I WAS ON A SMALL ISLAND ONCE, IN THE MIDDLE OF a great big lake, mountains all over the place, and as I watched the floating dock the wind kicked up, the waves rose from nowhere, and I imagined myself lying there and the dock suddenly breaking loose, carried away by the storm. I wondered if I could lie still and enjoy the sensation of rocking, after all I wouldn’t be dead yet, I wouldn’t be drowning, just carried off somewhere that wasn’t part of my plan. The very thought of it gave me the shivers. Still, how great to be enjoying the ride, however uncertain the outcome. I’d like that. It’s what we’re all doing anyway, we just don’t know it.

As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him. For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.

With love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light, and, alas, the blackest despair.

You struggle because you’re locating all of the magic in your life outside of yourself. When you are loved, then you are lovable. When you are left behind, you are unlovable. When you “arrive” at some point of success and fame as a writer, you will be worthy. Until then, you are worthless. As long as you imagine that the outside world will one day deliver to you the external rewards you need to feel happy, you will always perceive your survival as exhausting and perceive your life as a long slog to nowhere. Instead, you have to savor the tiny struggles of the day: The cold glass of water after a long run. The hot bath after hours of digging through the dirt. The satisfaction of writing a good sentence, a good paragraph. You MUST feel these things, because these aren’t small rewards on the path to some big reward; these tiny things are everything. Savoring these things requires tuning in to your feelings, and it requires loving yourself instead of shoving your nose into your own question marks hour after hour, day after day. You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in the middle of the suffocating dust. If you can learn to be where you are, without fear, then sooner than you know it, your life will quite naturally be filled with more love and more wonder than you can possibly handle. When that happens, you’ll look back and see that this was the most romantic time of your whole life. These are those terrible days, those gorgeous days, when you first learned to breathe and stand alone without fear, to believe not in finish lines but in the race itself. Your legs are aching and your heart is pounding and the world is electric. You will have 30 years or 50 years, or maybe you’ll be gone tomorrow. All that matters is this moment, right now. This is the moment you learn to be here, to feel your limbs, to feel your full heart, to realize, for the first time, just how lucky you are.

My advice would be to find a good woman and steer well clear of the whole bloody business, and it’s a shame no one told me the same twenty years ago.” He looked sideways at Jezal. “But if, say, you’re stuck out on some great wide plain in the middle of nowhere and can’t avoid it, there’s three rules I’d take to a fight. First, always do your best to look the coward, the weakling, the fool. Silence is a warrior’s best armour, the saying goes. Hard looks and hard words have never won a battle yet, but they’ve lost a few.” “Look the fool, eh? I see.” Jezal had built his whole life around trying to appear the cleverest, the strongest, the most noble. It was an intriguing idea, that a man might choose to look like less than he was. “Second, never take an enemy lightly, however much the dullard he seems. Treat every man like he’s twice as clever, twice as strong, twice as fast as you are, and you’ll only be pleasantly surprised. Respect costs you nothing, and nothing gets a man killed quicker than confidence.” “Never underestimate the foe. A wise precaution.” Jezal was beginning to realise that he had underestimated this Northman. He wasn’t half the idiot he appeared to be. “Third, watch your opponent as close as you can, and listen to opinions if you’re given them, but once you’ve got your plan in mind, you fix on it and let nothing sway you. Time comes to act, you strike with no backwards glances. Delay is the parent of disaster, my father used to tell me, and believe me, I’ve seen some disasters.

By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers. The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars. I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky. Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening. Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables. I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear. There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day. That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof. I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again. And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl. Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor. I don't quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that. I wanted to be saying it's just something that happens. But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose. Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink. Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth. I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what's wrong. But there was no one there, and no one came.

A bum stood at the Lucky Market right in front of Artesia & Blossom. He was begging for money. He looked pretty pathetic, dressed in rancid, oily clothes. He smelled like cigarettes and urine. “Can you spare a dime?” he would ask. People would shake their heads or walk around him. He was getting nowhere. Two hours went by, no money, not a cent. “Please, a dime!” cried the bum. A middle-aged man walked by him, heard his plea and laid upon him a mint new dime. “Thank you, sir! Thank you!” shouted the bum. Dime in hand, the bum limped over to a phone booth and called in the airstrike.

. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . . But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?” I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich. He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.” “Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked. After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.

Catching my breath, I lean against the front of the car and focus on the individual blades of grass hedging my flip-flop, trying not to throw up or pass out or both. In the far distance, a vehicle approaches-the first one to witness the scene of our accident. A million explanations run through my mind, but I can’t imagine a single scenario that would solve all-or any-of our issues right now. None of us can risk going to the hospital. Mom technically doesn’t qualify as human, so I’m sure we’d get a pretty interesting diagnosis. Rachel is technically supposed to be deceased as of the last ten years or so, and while she probably has a plethora of fake IDs, she’s still antsy around cops, which will surely be called to the hospital in the event of a gunshot wound, even if it is just in the foot. And let’s not forget that Mom and Rachel are new handcuff buddies. There just isn’t an explanation for any of this. That’s when I decide I’m not the one who should do the talking. After all, I didn’t kidnap anyone. I didn’t shoot anyone. And I certainly didn’t handcuff myself to the person who shot me. Besides, both Mom and Rachel are obviously much more skilled at deception then I’ll ever be. “If someone pulls over to help us, one of you is explaining all this,” I inform them. “You’ll probably want to figure it out fast, because here comes a car.” But the car comes and goes without even slowing. In fact, a lot of cars come and go, and if the situation weren’t so strange and if I weren’t so thankful that they didn’t actually stop, I’d be forced to reexamine what the world is coming to, not helping strangers in an accident. Then it occurs to me that maybe the passerby don’t realize it’s the scene of an accident. Mom’s car is in the ditch, but the ditch might be steep enough to hide it. It’s possible that no one can even see Rachel and Mom from the side of the road. Still, I am standing at the front of Rachel’s car. An innocent-looking teenage girl just loitering for fun in the middle of nowhere and no one cares to stop? Seriously? Just as I decide that people suck, a vehicle coming from the opposite direction slows and pulls up a few feet behind us. It’s not a good Samaritan traveler pulling over to see what he or she can do to inadvertently complicate things. It’s not an ambulance. It’s not a state trooper. If only we could be so lucky. But, nope, it’s way worse. Because it’s Galen’s SUV. From where I stand, I can see him looking at me from behind the wheel. His face is stricken and tried and relieved and pained. I want to want to want to believe the look in his eyes right now. The look that clearly says he’s found what he’s looking for, in more ways than one.

I want to be married,” I blurted. “I want you to marry me.” Fuuuuuuuck. And so my entire carefully constructed speech was thrown out the window. My grandmother’s antique ring was in a box in the dresser—nowhere near me—and my plan to kneel and do everything right just evaporated. In the circle of my arms, Chloe grew very still. “What did you just say?” I had completely botched the plan, but it was too late to turn back now. “I know we have only been together for a little over a year,” I explained, quickly. “Maybe it’s too soon? I understand if it’s too soon. It’s just that how you feel about the way we kiss? I feel that way about everything we do together. I love it. I love to be inside you, I love working with you, I love watching you work, I love fighting with you, and I love just sitting on the couch and laughing with you. I’m lost when I’m not with you, Chloe. I can’t think of anything, or anyone, who is more important to me, every second. And so for me, that means we’re already sort of married in my head. I guess I wanted to make it official somehow. Maybe I sound like an idiot?” I looked over at her, feeling my heart try to jackhammer its way up my throat. “I never expected to feel this way about someone.” She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and fuck, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to you, I mean.” Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.” Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—” She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face. I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the fuck is that? “What the fuck is that?” I asked. “You tell me, genius.” “Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.” “It’s a ring, dummy. For you.” My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for me?” She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle. “You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?” She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.” “So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?” “You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling. “Technically you haven’t asked yet.” “Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!” “Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing. “Will you marry me?” With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.