“
The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.
”
”
Tom Robbins
“
I couldn't take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real.
”
”
Laura Whitcomb (A Certain Slant of Light (Light, #1))
“
...quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage.
”
”
Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
“
Love does not last forever, then?"
"He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.
”
”
Mary Balogh (Simply Perfect (Simply Quartet, #4))
“
In the silence, she felt the past and the present shift and mix, but that was a mirage. There was no way to comfort the lost boy he'd been back then.
But she had the grown male.
She had him right in her arms, and for a brief moment of whimsy, she imagined that she was never, ever going to let him go.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #8))
“
Love is an illusion. It's nothing but a mirage. It doesn't matter how he looks on the outside, or who he is on the inside. Right now, you're convinced that you love your darling, but... try thinking about it logically.
”
”
Tomoko Hayakawa (The Wallflower, Vol. 19 (The Wallflower, #19))
“
But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.
”
”
Deb Caletti (The Secret Life of Prince Charming)
“
In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.
”
”
Mark Kurlansky (Salt: A World History)
“
She thirsted for love, but found only a mirage. Some hearts are a desert you can die wandering in.
”
”
John Mark Green
“
day by day i realize
everything i miss about you
was never there in the first place
- the person i fell in love with was a mirage
”
”
Rupi Kaur (The Sun and Her Flowers)
“
…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there
”
”
Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
“
When night falls, come and visit me, For I have seen night keeps secrets best.
”
”
Somaiya Daud (Mirage (Mirage, #1))
“
When pride and image matter more to you than demonstrating love, there is no love only vanity." ~ Jill Thrussell
”
”
Jill Thrussell (Mirage of Identity)
“
I have belonged to you in a way you haven’t to me.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1939-1947))
“
You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.
”
”
Gustave Thibon
“
They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1939-1947))
“
Smoke fills the room, gray and sylphlike, lovely in its deadly grace. It trails into the fire and forms what appear to be wings—black and magnificent. A man’s silhouette fills out the image, two arms reaching for me.
Morpheus, or a mirage?
My mind trips back to our dance across the starlit sky in Wonderland, how amazing it felt to be so free. What would it feel like to dance with him in the middle of a blazing inferno, surrounded by an endless power that breathes and grows at our will?
”
”
A.G. Howard (Unhinged (Splintered, #2))
“
We are all thieves here, Mirage,” Thibo breathed. “We steal a thousand scintillating moments of drinking and dancing and laughter and pretend that there will never be any cost for the choices we make. But the price of love is heartbreak. The price of pleasure is pain. And the price of power is always corruption.
”
”
Lyra Selene (Amber & Dusk (Amber & Dusk, #1))
“
Poem for My Love
How do we come to be here next to each other
in the night
Where are the stars that show us to our love
inevitable
Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness
and the rain
falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh
the black men waiting on the corner for
a womanly mirage
I am amazed by peace
It is this possibility of you
asleep
and breathing in the quiet air
”
”
June Jordan (Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems)
“
She must have heard the door opening and closing in the middle of the night; she produces a smile, warm, conspiratorial, and I know what circuits are closing in her head: by screwing Joe she's brought us back together. Saving the world, everyone wants to; men think they can do it with guns, women with their bodies, love conquers all, conquerors love all, mirages raised by words.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)
“
Truth and love are so intertwined, it’s impossible for one to exist without the other." ~Jill Thrussell
”
”
Jill Thrussell (Mirage of Identity)
“
If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you’re likely pursuing a mirage.
”
”
Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
“
It so happens that this is particular love was precisely the sort best suited to the state of her soul. It was a sort of remote worship, a mute contemplation, a deification by an unknown votary. It was the apprehension of adolescence by adolescence, her dreams becoming romance ad remain in dream, the wished-for phantom realized at last and made flash, but still without name or wrong or fault, or need, or defect; in a word, a lover distant and ideal, a chimera having form. Any closer and more palpable encounter at this first stage would have terrified Cosette, still half buried in the magnifying mirage of the cloister. She had all the terrors of children and all the terrors of nuns mingled. The spirit of the convent, in which she had been steeped for five years, was still evaporating from her whole person, and made everything tremulous around her. In this condition, it was not a lover she needed, it was not even an admirer, it was a vision. She began to adore Marius as something charming, luminous, and impossible.
”
”
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
“
(Golden Globe acceptance speech in the style of Jane Austen's letters):
"Four A.M. Having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding, was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. Miss Lindsay Doran, of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly apppeared to understand me better than I undersand myself. Mr. James Schamus, a copiously erudite gentleman, and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has lernt to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Canton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a vast deal of money. Miss Lisa Henson -- a lovely girl, and Mr. Gareth Wigan -- a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activitiy until eleven P.M. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due therefore not to the dance, but to the waiting, in a long line for horseless vehicles of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport.
P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Tomkins who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious creature."
"With gratitude and apologies to Miss Austen, thank you.
”
”
Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
“
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever – mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ's kingdom on earth, the workers' paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.
”
”
Ian McEwan (Saturday)
“
Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for—ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s sake—for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes. But she, who knew little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes. She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her. She stumbled and halted in her utterance. The thread of argument slipped from her. He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.
”
”
Jack London (Martin Eden)
“
There is the staircase,
there is the sun.
There is the kitchen,
the plate with toast and strawberry jam,
your subterfuge,
your ordinary mirage.
You stand red-handed.
You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grass
What are you supposed to do
with all this loss?
In the daylight we know
what's gone is gone,
but at night it's different.
Nothing gets finished,
not dying, not mourning;
the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunks
lurching sideways through the doors
we open to them in sleep;
these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,
even those we have loved the most,
especially those we have loved the most,
returning from where we shoved them
away too quickly:
from under the ground, from under the water,
they clutch at us, they clutch at us,
we won't let go.
”
”
Margaret Atwood
“
So you don’t mind,” I managed, “if I’m a monster?” “No.” He rocked closer, and his closeness sent a thread of desire stitching up my spine. “Because I’m a monster too.
”
”
Lyra Selene (Amber & Dusk (Amber & Dusk, #1))
“
...and i will step out of the mirage, into your arms, to lose myself and find myself inside you.
”
”
Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows)
“
Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later – because I did not belong there, did not come from there – but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
”
”
Joan Didion
“
Food of Love
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II
I'm going to murder you with love;
I'm going to suffocate you with embraces;
I'm going to hug you, bone by bone,
Till you're dead all over.
Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.
You will become my personal Sahara;
I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow
Drain you remaining brackish well.
With my female blade I'll carve my name
In your most aspiring palm
Before I chop it down.
Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole.
But in the total desert you become
You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,
Opulent mirage!
Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen.
Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.
So you will summon each dry grain of sand
And move towards me in undulating dunes
Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine:
A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;
Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes
Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,
Surprising life! And I will be that green.
When you are fed and watered, flourishing
With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire,
Till you are resurrected field in bloom,
I will devour you, my natural food,
My host, my final supper on the earth,
And you'll begin to die again.
”
”
Carolyn Kizer
“
I have become intoxicated again.
You are such a potent wine, my friend.
To escape your withdrawal effects,
tomorrow I will drink in excess.
Alas, why make me love?
I was aware, conscious, and sensible before.
I am ill by cause of this illusion.
The devil plays tricks on me more and more.
I was a harp you immaculately plucked at will.
Your score, the nightingale song within
notes composed to imprison and bear me wings.
Oh, if only they could hear how it sings!
I am now beyond parched.
My strings left untouched.
You are no longer an oasis, my friend,
but a mirage soon coming to an end.
”
”
Kamand Kojouri
“
The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle)
“
You can't comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable.
”
”
Lady Diana (The Mirage of Love)
“
An inch long scar on my left wrist, reminded me of an enchanted world of love, which had vanished like a mirage.
”
”
Preethi Venugopala (Without You (Sreepuram Series Book 1))
“
Some seek pleasure in love
blind to the trials of a mortal body
others see a bubble or mirage
and realize impermanence undoes us all
a real man's will is straight like iron
in an uncrooked heart the Way is true
dense and tall bamboos in the snow
show you the mind not used in vain
”
”
Hanshan (The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition))
“
When their eyes connected she tilted her head slightly…paused, and smiled. It was as if she needed to see him at a different angle to insure that her instant desire wasn’t a vanishing mirage
”
”
Carl Henegan (Darkness Left Undone)
“
I urge you to come on feet faster than the wind, Come and rise over my breast and take root in me and plough me. And no matter what befalls you while we're entwined, Don't let me go until you've flushed me thrice.
”
”
Somaiya Daud (Mirage (Mirage, #1))
“
When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage”
“Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time,” she said.
”
”
K.J. Bishop (The Etched City)
“
I know love because I am in love. Because of how long I’ve loved. Because of the man I love.
Love used to be a beautiful mirage, a moonbeam on the water I tried to cup in my hands. Now it is a grand oak tre, tried and tested, roots driving deep down into the earth. I have a love that takes me across oceans. A love that tells me I am home, no matter where I am in the world.
”
”
Lang Leav (Love Looks Pretty on You)
“
BEWARE DON'T RUN AFTER A MIRAGE
We were happier when we were poor. We were happier when we did not have good food to eat or good clothes to wear. We were happier when we did not have a luxurious life. We were happier when we did not have our own house because we had a home, a family and understood, loved and lived for each other. I have failed to understand what we run after even when we have all.
”
”
Amit Abraham
“
I yearned for love, I prayed that love
Would soften a way to my heart.
To turn the sun where the shadows run
And banish the cold and the dark.
Yet all I am is a faint mirage
Fashioned in light of your dream;
Longing to love, and longing to leave,
Held forever by the walls unseen.
”
”
Juke Blue
“
When we recognize that, just like the glass, our body is already broken, that indeed we are already dead, then life becomes precious, and we open to it just as it is, in the moment it is occurring. When we understand that all our loved ones are already dead — our children, our mates, our friends — how precious they become. How little fear can interpose; how little doubt can estrange us. When you live your life as though you're already dead, life takes on new meaning. Each moment becomes a whole lifetime, a universe unto itself.
When we realize we are already dead, our priorities change, our heart opens, and our mind begins to clear of the fog of old holdings and pretendings. We watch all life in transit, and what matters becomes instantly apparent: the transmission of love; the letting go of obstacles to understanding; the relinquishment of our grasping, of our hiding from ourselves. Seeing the mercilessness of our self-strangulation, we begin to come gently into the light we share with all beings. If we take each teaching, each loss, each gain, each fear, each joy as it arises and experience it fully, life becomes workable. We are no longer a "victim of life." And then every experience, even the loss of our dearest one, becomes another opportunity for awakening.
If our only spiritual practice were to live as though we were already dead, relating to all we meet, to all we do, as though it were our final moments in the world, what time would there be for old games or falsehoods or posturing? If we lived our life as though we were already dead, as though our children were already dead, how much time would there be for self-protection and the re-creation of ancient mirages? Only love would be appropriate, only the truth.
”
”
Stephen Levine (Who Dies? : An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying)
“
We have all spent many years building up a conditioned view of life. There is “me” and there is this “thing” out there that is either hurting me or pleasing me. We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other. Without exception, we all do this. We remain separate from our life, looking at it, analyzing it, judging it, seeking to answer the questions, “What am I going to get out of it? Is it going to give me pleasure or comfort or should I run away from it?” We do this from morning until night.
We have to see through the mirage that there is an “I” separate from “that.” Our practice is to close the gap. Only in that instant when we and the object become one can we see what our life is.
”
”
Charlotte Joko Beck (Everyday Zen: Love & Work)
“
When I’m with you … I remember who I was, who I am, when I’m with you.”
My heart crawled into my throat when I let myself look at him … That had been another life. I’d been another person. Who he remembered, that girl he’d loved, that person wasn’t in the woman he was staring at now. That girl had died with that boy. That woman was a mirage.
”
”
Nicole Williams (Tortured)
“
mirage and reality merge in love
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
“
When you look back do you see yourself or a Mirage of your Self?
”
”
Debatrayee Banerjee
“
In the castle of utmost happiness, there always remains a window open for sadness to pop inside.
”
”
Sappho Khizar
“
The man she loved was no more than a mirage - his image ever-present and haunting, but as empty and out of reach as the love she'd hoped to have.
”
”
Julie Lessman (A Hope Undaunted (Winds of Change, #1))
“
There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved” – George Sand
”
”
Ashley Suzanne (Destined Series Box Set: Mirage, Inception, Awakening, Facade and Epiphany (Destined, #1-4))
“
While for man, the physicality of woman fuels his sexual love for her, it was the sexual fulfillment from man that feeds woman’s love for him.
”
”
B.S. Murthy (Crossing the Mirage - Passing through Youth)
“
day by day i realize everything i miss about you was never there in the first place - the person i fell in love with was a mirage
”
”
Rupi Kaur (The Sun and Her Flowers)
“
Life without strife is a rose without thorns.
Alive as one is thriving today towards tomorrow,
Nowhere is the past but simply a school of memory.
Dreams, wishes, goals then becomes a wheel of “wills,”
Spirit of a unique being on each soul breathing.
Care to ponder some matter or another?
Awareness sliding towards discovery gliding…
Peace, contentment, fulfillment,
Enwrapped like a mirage enchantment.
Soaring freely, excitingly, happily home-love-bound!
Over precious moments in a breathing of a soul,
Flowing high emotions, feelings, hearts in bliss.
All around any season of one's existence, one asks:
“Anyone out there?
A heart of a soul that didn’t harden?
A touch of a soul that didn’t hurt?
A life of a soul that didn't love?”
Sands of time, rough, warm, indefinite,
simply spreading, transforming, mounting.
Oasis of a soul from a desert journey,
flourishing with endless beauty and security.
Utmost bliss, fulfillment and contentment,
under covers a struggling, hopeful soul,
Laboring service, living justice,
loving peace and tranquillity passed on to humanity!�
”
”
Angelica Hopes (Rhythm of a Heart, Music of a Soul)
“
Don't look for neighbors in your silence. For that noise that distracts from the breathing of your own life. Never bow your head to loveless duties those mirages you were taught to chase while others walked their path. Tend to the wealth and splendor in your laughter. Be selfish with your love. Stock, simmer, and seal it in jars for winter, all year long. Keep your love.
”
”
K. Eltinaé (The Moral Judgement of Butterflies)
“
An individual's torments only have meaning within his or her personal experience. Faced with the collective we are as naked and helpless as the day we were born. Our individual development depends on realizing that others cannot understand our experience. Sometimes the obstacles we meet tempt us to place our destiny in the hands of another. But we cannot live by proxy, we must take everything on our own shoulders. Then we know we are alone. We must allow this sensation to fill our being and live like abandoned children because only thus is our life in our own hands. From time to time a mirage will surface of some way of life that will free us from the feeling of abandonment; but a mirage is exactly what it will remain.
We can of course live solely within the collective, with the illusion of speaking a common language and of not being alone, but this deception can cost our lives. If we act according to the general rule, we are following a code that is not our own. Everyone must find his or her own tune, accepting the resulting abandonment by those who continue singing in concert. Great artists create modes of expression that are uniquely their own: they enter so deeply into their sense of life that preexisting modes no longer serve their purpose. They invent new ways of writing poetry, of painting and making music.
”
”
Aldo Carotenuto (Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 40))
“
I Know Love
I know love now because I am in love. Because of how long I’ve loved. Because of the man I love.
Love used to be a beautiful mirage, a moonbeam on the water I tried to cup in my hands. Now it is a grand oak tree, tried and tested, roots driving deep down into the earth. I have a love that takes me across oceans. A love that tells me I am home, no matter where I am in the world.
”
”
Lang Leav (Love Looks Pretty on You)
“
They were as unexpected as a mirage, those dancers on the Pont des Arts. Strictly speaking, the bridge is for pedestrians only, but waltzing is allowed on special nights like this. A guitar, a violin, an accordian -- a tune everyone knows -- and the dancers begin to twirl, spin, soar and glide all around us, in love with life at 3/4 time.
Did I say waltzing was allowed?
Under these circumstances, it's mandatory.
”
”
Vivian Swift (Le Road Trip: A Traveler's Journal of Love and France)
“
The fantasy bond (really bondage) is the illusion that someone is there for them, someone who loves and protects them. The fantasy bond is like a mirage in the desert. Once set up, the denying fantasy bond functions automatically and unconsciously. Years later, when reality is no longer life-threatening, the fantasy bond remains. This explains why abandoned (abused) children are described as having a compulsion to protect their parents.
”
”
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
“
Their gazes locked, and together they saw the squandered mirages slain beneath their feet, cemeteries of lonesome dreamers who gave up their wings under the name of love, salt-soaked kisses half-forgotten and twice-remembered.
”
”
Grace Curley (The Light that Binds Us)
“
Love is a feeling, a real, raw, and unscripted emotion so sensationally pure, unable to dull even under the strain of a world against it, strong enough to heal the broken and warm even the coldest of hearts. – Madeline Sheehan, UnBeautifully
”
”
Ashley Suzanne (Destined Series Box Set: Mirage, Inception, Awakening, Facade and Epiphany (Destined, #1-4))
“
Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows.
”
”
Chloe Thurlow (Girl Trade)
“
Tell you?” Sunder’s eyebrows winged up toward his hairline. “Tell you, an ignorant, unreliable, loudmouthed provincial with delusions of grandeur and an entitlement complex as big as this château? Your grasp of the intricacies of intrigue boggles the mind.
”
”
Lyra Selene (Amber & Dusk (Amber & Dusk, #1))
“
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. VI.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
Dust Moan
A love that should not exist on earth
I am in the wrong love or on the wrong planet
I am already heaven or maybe illusion
Can people tell how mirage I am?
How is love supposed to look and feel?
I half-ask god but am scared to hear
Hide the seams of prism children I am
So I do not have to kill them all
”
”
Melissa Broder (Last Sext)
“
And the mist of snow, as he had foreseen, was still on it - a ghost of snow falling in the bright sunlight, softly and steadily floating and turning and pausing, soundlessly meeting the snow that covered, as with a transparent mirage, the bare bright cobbles. He loved it - he stood still and loved it. Its beauty was paralyzing - beyond all words, all experience, all dream. No fairy-story he had ever read could be compared with it - none had ever given him this extraordinary combination of ethereal loveliness with a something else, unnameable, which was just faintly and deliciously terrifying.
("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")
”
”
Conrad Aiken (Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Modern Library))
“
There is so much melancholy involved with remembering, isn’t there? We have this ability to recall the things we once loved above all else, but lack the ability to actually relive those moments. It’s like the cruelest of mirages. We see it as it was, but know it shall never be again. It makes one wish to never have remembered it at all.
”
”
D.W. Ulsterman (The Writer (San Juan Islands Mystery, #1))
“
I don’t quite know why, but I felt somehow that Linda had been once more deceived in her emotions, that this explorer in the sandy waste had seen only another mirage. The lake was there, the trees were there, the thirsty camels had gone down to have their evening drink; alas, a few steps forward would reveal nothing but dust and desert as before.
”
”
Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love (Radlett & Montdore, #1))
“
Did I Not Say To You
Did I not say to you, “Go not there, for I am your friend; in this
mirage of annihilation I am the fountain of life?”
Even though in anger you depart a hundred thousand years
from me, in the end you will come to me, for I am your goal.
Did I not say to you, “Be not content with worldly forms, for I
am the fashioner of the tabernacle of your contentment?”
Did I not say to you, “I am the sea and you are a single fish;
go not to dry land, for I am your crystal sea?”
Did I not say to you, “ Go not like birds to the snare; come, for
I am the power of flight and your wings and feet?”
Did I not say to you, “ They will waylay you and make you
cold, for I am the fire and warmth and heat of your desire?”
Did I not say to you, “ They will implant in you ugly qualities
so that you will forget that I am the source of purity to you?”
Did I not say to you, “Do not say from what direction the ser-
vant’s affairs come into order?” I am the Creator without
directions.
If you are the lamp of the heart, know where the road is to the
house; and if you are godlike of attribute, know that I am your
Maser.
”
”
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
“
During his sweet sleep, there was an angelic creature and in her eyes a look of joyous elation that filled Kevin’s mind with anticipation of her possible existence in the real world. This freckle-faced vision with her wild mane of untamed blonde curls nightly left an unexplainable ache in his soul. In his dreams, she would appear to him as a mirage of hope. He could feel the love in her heart, for it seeped through her very essence into the air between them. She lay next to him in the grass as they quietly observed the sky above. Her hand seemed to be always just out of his reach. Kevin wanted to hold her hand so badly it was torturous. Her hand was just about touching his but not quite. Then her fingers brushed a path across his fingertips as if to say in the exquisite beauty of the moment, “I will always be right here.
”
”
Kim Cormack (Enlightenment)
“
There are three things you must remember about a woman. Never take her for granted. Never think you know what she is thinking. And never think you know what she will do in a given situation. A woman is like smoke. She will curl seductively around you one moment, burn your eyes the next, tickle your throat until you cough, and then poof! She is gone. She is a mirage. She is a thunderstorm. She is a sailboat on a sunny mirrored lake. She will run when you reach for her, and come to you when you wish her away. You can solve a problem. You can analyze logic. You can explain how vapor turns into water. But you cannot understand the mind of a woman. And do you know why? Because she does not understand herself."
"Then what do you do?"
"You love her and deal with her in all honesty. You earn her trust. And then you trust the Almighty, who made women the way they are, believing that He knew what He was doing."
"What if that doesn't help?"
"Blame Him.
”
”
Elaine Coffman (By Fire and by Sword (Graham-Lennox #3))
“
Riding Conflict with the Breath • Bring yourself to a place of restful awareness. • Let every thought float by like a dream, mirage, or an old and cancelled sitcom. • Inhale all of the negativity and stress of the difficulty at hand—whatever the current source of conflict, anger, fear, and tribulation. • Breathe deep, inhale, and hoover it up like you’re vacuuming dark clouds. Take it in and then let it dissolve in the inner luminosity of your infinite, radiant, empty nature of mind. • Exhale fully. Breathe out love, forgiveness, understanding, loving-kindness, empathic compassion, and life-giving healing energy. • Direct this positive breath specifically to perceived obstacle-creators and troublemakers. Poor humans . . . generating their own bad karma and sorrow, seeking happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places! • Simply breathe in and out. Let the natural flow wash away and re-harmonize all obscurations on the windshield of your inner “iye.
”
”
Surya Das (Make Me One with Everything: Buddhist Meditations to Awaken from the Illusion of Separation)
“
You want to leave the moat, to go back to the room; you’re already turning and trying to find the door, covered with fake leather, in the steep wall of the moat, but the master succeeds in grabbing your hand and, looking straight in your eyes, says: Your assignment: describe the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a hummingbird, the steeple of the New Maiden Convent, a shoot of bird cherry, the bend of the Lethe, the tail of any village dog, a night of love, mirages over hot asphalt, the bright midday in Berezov, the face of a flibbertigibbet, the garden of hell, compare the termite colony to the forest anthill, the sad fate of leaves to the serenade of a Venetian gondolier, and transform a cicada into a butterfly, turn rain into hail, day into night, give us today our daily bread, make a sibilant out of a vowel, prevent the crash of the train whose engineer is asleep, repeat the thirteenth labor of Hercules, give a smoke to a passerby, explain youth and old age, sing a song about a bluebird bringing water in the morn, turn your face to the north, to the Novgorodian barbicans, and then describe how the doorman knows it is snowing outside, if he sits in the foyer all day, talks to the elevator operator, and does not look out the window because there is no window; yes, tell how exactly, and in addition, plant in your orchard a white rose of the winds, show it to the teacher Pavel and, if he likes it, give the white rose to the teacher Pavel, pin the flower to his cowboy shirt or to his dacha hat, bring joy to the man who departed to nowhere, make your old pedagogue—a joker, a clown, and a wind-chaser—happy.
”
”
Sasha Sokolov (A School for Fools)
“
I am called, and I personify, the Improbability of Love. I was painted to celebrate the wild cascades of amour, the rollicking, bucking, breaking and transformative passion that inevitably gives way to miserable, constricting, overbearing disappointment. At first my master imbued every tiny brushstroke with unbound ardour, untrammelled desire and unquenchable lust. During the painting of the work he had to accept that his feelings were a mirage, a chimera in his mind. This is the great tragedy of love - even if you are lucky enough to stumble on it, it never lasts.
”
”
Hannah Rothschild (The Improbability of Love)
“
He thinks: "I have no self-confidence. I always feel everybody else is more competent, more attractive, more gifted than I am. Even the things I've managed to accomplish don't count, because I can't really credit myself with them. I may have been bluffing, or it may have been just a lucky break. I certainly can't be sure that I could do it again. And if people really knew me, they'd have no use for me anyway. But if I found someone who loved me as I am and to whom I was of prime importance, I would be somebody." No wonder, then, that love has all the lure of a mirage. No wonder that it should be clutched at in preference to the laborious process of changing from within.
”
”
Karen Horney (Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis)
“
All suffering is a consequence of a constant quest. A quest to follow a mirage, the mirage that is the creation of our mind, the illusion of happiness, the illusion of being loved. That is what it is. Love itself is an illusion. We misuse the word so much we forget what it means. It means nothing, because it simply does not exist. It is the destiny of the mind to seek. When it does not discover what it seeks, it gives birth to hopelessness. And given our undying spirit, from that hopelessness rises hope itself. This hope takes us to the quest all over again, churning us in an endless cycle of suffering. This cycle is called life. Suffer you will, one way or the other...
”
”
Nilesh Rathod
“
Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire “empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.
”
”
Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
“
And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly as we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in any case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twichings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition form below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible. Everything is different when you approach a Transposition from above.
”
”
Clive Staples Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
“
Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty.
Before the year is over, I think I will be looking back longingly on the Gulf of Lower California — that sea of mirages and timelessness. It is a very magical place.
It is cold and clear here now - the leaves all fallen from the trees and only the frogs are very happy. Great cheering sections of frogs singing all the time. The earth is moist and water is seeping out of the ground everywhere. So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.
Maybe you can find some vague theology that will give you hope. Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.
There it is — It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded. And so I'll look to see this German plan collapse because they do not know enough to plan for everything.
”
”
John Steinbeck (Steinbeck: A Life in Letters)
“
Reck-Malleczewen, whom I mentioned before, tells of a female "leader" who came to Bavaria to give the peasants a pep talk in the summer of 1944. She seems not to have wasted much time on "miracle weapons" and victory, she faced frankly the prospect of defeat, about which no good German needed to worry because the Führer "in his great goodness had prepared for the whole German people a mild death through gassing in case the war should have an unhappy end." And the writer adds: "Oh, no, I'm not imagining things, this lovely lady is not a mirage, I saw her with my own eyes: a yellow-skinned female pushing forty, with insane eyes. . . . And what happened?
Did these Bavarian peasants at least put her into the local lake to cool off her enthusiastic readiness for death? They did nothing of the sort. They went home, shaking their heads.
”
”
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
“
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever—mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it’s tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes. Naturally,
”
”
Ian McEwan (Saturday)
“
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. Chapter 6 — Hundreds of People The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the waves of four months had roiled over the trial for treason, and carried
”
”
Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens: The Complete Novels)
“
If- if I could find a way to free you," I whispered, "would you walk the world above with me?"
My back was to the Goblin King; I could not face him. It was a long time before he answered.
"Oh, Elisabeth," he said. "I would go anywhere with you."
I turned around. His eyes deepened in color and for a moment, just for the merest glimpse, I could see what he would have been like as a mortal man. If he had been allowed to live the course of his life, from the child he had been to the man he would have become. A musician- a violinist. I ran back into the circle of alder trees, wanting the circle of his arms around me. I reached out my hands, and his fingers brushed mine, but we passed through each other like water, like a mirage. We were each nothing but a shimmering illusion, a candle flame we could not hold.
And yet, the Goblin King was still here, in the Goblin Grove, with me. He stood in the Underground while I stood in the world above, but our hearts beat within the same space.
"Don't look back," he said.
I nodded. I love you, I wanted to say. But I knew these words would break me.
"Elisabeth."
The Goblin King was smiling. Not the pointed smile of the Lord of Mischief or Der Erlkönig, but a crooked one. Twisted to one side, lopsided and goofy, it cracked my heart open and I bled inside.
He mouthed a word at me. A name. "You've always had it, Elisabeth," he said softly. "For it is you I gave my soul.
”
”
S. Jae-Jones (Wintersong (Wintersong, #1))
“
But once the work was done, we sat down in a warm patch of Sunlight outside his house where the peonies were slowly coming into bloom, and the whole world seemed covered in a fine layer of gold leaf. “What have you done in life?” Boros suddenly asked. This question was so unexpected that I instantly let myself be carried away by memories. They began to sail past my eyes, and typically for memories, everything in them seemed better, finer, and happier than in reality. It’s strange, but we didn’t say a word. For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air. That’s what was going through my mind as we sat there in silence. It was better than a conversation. I have no idea what either of the men was thinking about. Perhaps about the same thing.
”
”
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
“
Already, in fact, rebellion, without claiming to solve everything, can at least confront its problems. From
this moment high noon is borne away on the fast-moving stream of history. Around the devouring flames,
shadows writhe in mortal combat for an instant of time and then as suddenly disappear, and the blind,
fingering their eyelids, cry out that this is history. The men of Europe, abandoned to the shadows, have
turned their backs upon the fixed and radiant point of the present. They forget the present for the future,
the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the eternal city,
ordinary justice for an empty promised land. They despair of personal freedom and dream of a strange
freedom of the species; reject solitary death and give the name of immortality to a vast collective agony.
They no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that
it no longer loves life. Its blind men entertain the puerile belief that to love one single day of life amounts
to justifying whole centuries of oppression. That is why they wanted to efface joy from the world and to
postpone it until a much later date. Impatience with limits, the rejection of their double life, despair at
being a man, have finally driven them to inhuman excesses. Denying the real grandeur of life, they have
had to stake all on their own excellence. For want of something better to do, they deified themselves and
their misfortunes began; these gods have had their eyes put out. Kaliayev, and his brothers throughout the
entire world, refuse, on the contrary, to be deified in that they refuse the unlimited power to inflict death.
They choose, and
give us as an example the only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a
man, to refuse to be a god.
”
”
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
“
Sorrow walked in my clothes before I did. Flocks
of shadows followed me. One night I looked at the stars
I thought were gods until they disappeared. Some say
I smashed my father’s idols and walked away.
Or walked towards a desert of barren promises.
Or promises that are hummingbirds hovering for
a moment then drifting away. Even now, walking
towards that mountain, sometimes I will watch
my shadow sitting beneath a plane tree, casting dice,
ignoring my steps. Some of you made me a founder
but it was only that shadow. Some of you made me
your father, but it was yourselves you were describing.
You plant a tree, you dig a well, and it brings life,
that’s all. Everything else is the heart’s mirage.
Except what begins inside you. Except Sarah.
When she stepped inside my dream the curtains
shivered, whole mountains entered the room.
It always seemed a question of which love to honor.
The land I loved fills with fire. Who should we listen to?
It’s true, He offered the world and I offered only
myself. But I thought His words were coffins. I was
frantic for any scrap of shade. Now everything is
shade. Your old newspapers are taken up by the wind
like pairs of broken wings. Each window, each door is
a wound. One track erases another track. One bomb.
One rock, one rubber bullet. What can I tell you?
Where have you left your own morning of promises?
You remember Isaac, maybe Ishmael, but not the love
that led me there. Not Sarah. Just to hear the sound
of her eyelids opening, or her plants pushing the air
aside as they reach for the sun, twilight filling
her fingers like fruit. This afternoon a flock of doves
settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape
of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle
you want aches inside the trees. Why believe
anything except what is unbelievable? I never
thought of it as a trial, not any of it. Now the leaves
turn into messages that are simply impossible to read.
The roots turn into roads as they break through
the surface. How can I even know what I mean?
Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep
on the grass. We have to turn into each other.
One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word.
Inside us, our shadows will walk into water,
the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful.
Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds.
Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe
the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes
the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all.
”
”
Richard Jackson
“
What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.
”
”
Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
“
I stopped dreaming amidst a shower.
There was a day I felt love within myself despite all my flaws, magic
which I saw left me to think, do you exist?
I stopped dreaming amidst a shower.
It was very crucial to leave a place called her, with all the sweet and
sour memories belonged, it changed everything when I visited very own
her as a guest. It trailed my life as a haunted scream.
I stopped dreaming amidst a shower.
She was special to him, as hard to search, impossible to rescue,
impossible to dent, his mirage for her became more and more
unbearable. He felt he choked his lungs out. He couldn’t breathe
anymore.
I stopped dreaming amidst a shower.
It was so great to be on the priority of somebody whom you want to
annoy for rest of your life. It was very precious in his life never felt the
thirst to be more alive again.
I stopped dreaming amidst a shower.
She had the same enemies as I had, she walked with me in dark and
never let me walk alone in light. He never had the desire to dream
again.
I stopped dreaming amidst a shower.
”
”
Karan M. Pai
“
Hover through the Fog and Filthy Air
Nursery school for demons
Getting to know yourself through crime
Brain music
like a wounded ambulance
praying in tongues
Telepathic merchandise
A rhapsodic interrogation of love
Another haunted customer
Soothing you to sleep
and infesting your dreams with mechanical tarantulas
Carnivorous mirage
The night that hides
inside the night you know
The night that knows you
The fierce bliss
of the holy glint
The lethal myth
you carried
all your life
The voice
within my voice
the only one I listen to
was never born
Sometimes everything’s my child
Emotions are deployed
in glassy air
Lots of wondering what to do
in the empty lobby
and the all night laundromat
The diamond swimming in the noisy light
A little origami holy ghost
The rain goes on softly
not wanting to know
my side of the story
Bloodstreams running
with whispering stars
A loose confederation
of feral children
without human language
living in ruined cathedrals on the moon
pledging allegiance to
the buildings
and how they appear
the grey noise
of the interstate
new understandings
of madness
and terrible love
half buried in leaves
The trapeze artist of the abyss
Her discipline
Her ascetic silhouette
The way we never see her face
no matter how she twists
”
”
Richard Cronshey
“
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Lewis continues: “If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.
”
”
Armand M. Nicholi Jr. (The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life)
“
My mother the most beautiful woman in the world,As ur daughter looking myself in the mirror, I want to reflect the sparkle of ur eyes, I want to reflect the beauty of ur warm smile, I want to reflect the kindness of ur heart, I want to reflect the courage to face life, I want to Be the Mirage of your Presence .
”
”
Motherly Love.
“
True love is a mirage… it does exist. We do get enamored and infatuated by it but we have to keep following it till eternity.
”
”
Balroop Singh
“
~Infernal Serpent ~
Winds are venomous these days.
Masked under a dark silhouette, their smile
parades the fossil roots of deceit.
Nibbling wings, of which
they learnt to fly.
Hands blemished red
Have you slaughtered a rose lately?
The face bleached in dismay
tongue weakened.
I ain't, the fear following you
Like a cloud
passing above your shadow.
Run!! How far?
There is no path across the desert.
Fright of a nomad creates mirage
in distance
Standing in silence,
I want to witness the snake
shedding its skin again.
”
”
Satbir Singh Noor
“
I love this quote because it is all about defeating fear. Every great and extraordinary accomplishment in this world was done through courage. Hell, you don’t even get to be born unless your mother has the courage to have you. I repeat this phrase when I’m anxious or nervous about something. I ask myself, what’s the worst that can happen. Usually, the answer is, “You can die.” Then I answer back, “I’d rather die doing something I feel is great and amazing rather than be safe and comfortable living a life I hate.” I talk to myself a lot, and this quote helps me sort out my fears and deal with them. The more you run from your fears, the bigger they get, but the more you go into them, the more they tend to vanish like a mirage.
”
”
Timothy Ferris (Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
“
And all the qualities she loved about me … they’re not real. They are the qualities of a fictional character who is actually very, very different from me. This is a mirage called acting. Surrounded by another mirage called celebrity.
”
”
Brent Spiner (Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir: Inspired by True Events)
“
In the castle of utmost happiness, there always remains a window open for sadness to pop inside.
-Mirage
”
”
Mirage Studios
“
When passion and friendship sprint in one race, passionate friendship transmutes to a mirage in the diary of love and kiss.
”
”
Joydeep Kar
“
Most of the Times, Life shows us how difficult this journey is, only at Times when the sun clears we see the Sunshine, but the rain often washes away the clouds and both the clouds and the rain dampen our weary hearts, only to let us see a glimpse of a distant rainbow, once in a while. I guess it's always about the Time, the guardian of this Journey that we have to wait and persevere, that we have to remain resilient in the resolve to walk ahead, to find some way to hold on to the voyage, to not let the ship sink in the hollows of a mirage, to just live.
And that is what Life is about, perhaps to know that Gloom and Melancholy is a distinct part of our journey, and actually something that occupies the most part of our journey, and it doesn't have to be a deep Grief it can simply be the mundane sorrow of carrying on this existence knowing that Life is just a short frame holding dark colours as much as the bright ones, sometimes even more of those blackness only to bring out the whites a little bit more.
And while all of this goes on, somewhere our heart would know that there is One who is beyond this frame of Life and the space of Time and Cosmos; who is always holding your hand giving you the breath to walk ahead. May be He doesn't take away the blackness but throughout stays firm in your path, holding your shadow and your soul ever so gently to make you become the Light that you could only possibly be by embracing all of your Soul's journey. He doesn't perhaps change the potholes in your way, but He does ensure that even when you tumble you don't end up falling and if you do fall, He makes sure that you rise all over again from the flames of Life's fire with the fury of a phoenix. He doesn't end your suffering but lets you see that throughout your pain He is partaking in an even greater portion of it, alongside you. Simple, He doesn't let you see that He is God, because He shares your Life as a companion, walking beside you hand in hand, to make you live all that your soul had contracted before this journey began and even when He is beyond Time, He lets Time be your friend in a journey that is bound in human flesh and guarded by the tick-tock of that guardian.
So when I asked my Soul, what is that troubles me the most, I heard my Soul, Smile in a safe knowledge, when I have Him, need I let my troubles concern me?
My heart knew, He has already tucked my mind in the tranquil world of Life's paint-brush and a rainbow is just around the corner. A distant yet distinct rainbow.
A rainbow that is churned in Love, the love that only He can provide, the Love that is always lurking on the edges of those clouds and rain, in the silhouette of a rainbow forever promised on the other side of a thunderstorm.
Love & Light, always
- Debatrayee
”
”
Debatrayee Banerjee
“
An Unrequited Vision by Stewart Stafford
Though the sheen of infatuation,
Deflects the glare of humanity,
I must bathe naked in my flaws
To peel your blinding cataracts.
This intrusion is not a sweet union,
'Tis a hand plucking a stringless harp,
A looking glass without reflection,
A mirage of the shimmering sun.
Affection's look clouds with malice,
Eyes flit to the blade to save face,
Stay that rash hand of vengeance,
Allow a beauteous refill of your gaze.
© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
Even if the poet is very truthful, his thought of love is a mirage, and the journey of the mirage begins with a lie and ends at the destination of a lie.
”
”
Ehsan Sehgal