Origami Quotes

Don't bother her, don't try to talk to her, don't even look at her, or I'll fold you in half so many times you'll look like a tiny little origami werewolf.

She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one.

My throat tightened when I noticed a small tattoo of an origami rose on his upper arm. . . "Hey, Lenzi," he whispered, barely louder than the surf. "Rose," I said as our lips met. "My name is Rose.

People keep talking about this unfolding. I can't trust the unfolding, okay? If there is some higher power making origami out of the universe, it hates my guts. I was a fat kid whose parents got divorced, whose father died, and then who got cancer herself. So no. I don't trust how things are going to unfold.

Nix and Emma: 'Looks like you just found a new talent.' 'Great. Why couldn't I be good at underwater origami or something?

don’t shrink your truth to make it fit nice and neatly in others as if it’s origami. unfold and free yourself.

Jason: I'm all for hobbies, but you think this is the time for origami? Whatcha making, a crane?

It feels like the world is folding up around me, like origami paper, and I’m trapped inside of its breathless center.

I spot a little origami bird made of notepaper I once flicked at him during a meeting. It is balanced on the edge of the bookshelf.

the feelings flattened and folded and turned into something else, like emotional origami.

Kau tak penat tunggu?" "Kejar lagi penat kan?

The Force- always may it be with you.

The second thing I thought was that I knew everything. Lettie Hempstock's ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was - where the universe began, to the sound of the uncreated voices singing in the void-and I knew where the Rose was -the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang, which would be, I knew now, nothing of the kind.

Sometimes I wonder if all my friends are insane.

I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there's any grudges I should start.

Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing.

Never underestimate the power of the dark side.

For him, she bends over backwards. It is origami of the heart. (Pour lui, elle se plie en quatre. - C'est l'origami du cœur)

Personality is a piece of paper that folds in to conceal different sides and display others, like an Origami

Nothing is set in stone. A bird can be refolded into a boat, a fish, a kimono, or any other extravagant vision. At other times it aches to return to its original folds. The paper begins to fray. It tires, rebels.

He looked like a man who was turning into paper, folding himself into origami angles, fragile and friable and prone to crumple.

her spine was the crease on a piece of paper, her bones no more than diagonal folds on a bit of origami

Alone in cold sheets, I imagine us folded like paper In our origami bed. And it keeps me warm.

Your mother is in the bedside chair. She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds. Using a long needle, she is stringing brightly colored origami cranes into garlands. You know what she's doing: It's a Japanese custom called senbazuru. If you make one thousand paper cranes, you can restore someone to good health. Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them. This is marriage.

He framed my face now, and I met his stare in the dark of the car. "I think you're beautiful." My heart folded like an origami swan.

La personalidad es un papel que se pliega para ocultar distintas facetas y mostrar otras, como un origami.

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.And—I would argue as well—all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying

Tearing the paper means you've stopped believing in the infinite possibilities of a square.

Much of the Kama Sutra is like origami; I don’t quite understand all the bending that needs to happen.

A master of origami said he tried to express with paper the joy of life, and the last thought before a man dies.

he was not the first general to welcome statistics he wanted to hear—but the numbers emerged from an intricate origami of war bureaucracy: South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and American. The truth was bent at every fold for reasons that went beyond propaganda to self-interest, sycophancy, and wishful thinking.

I watched her and I watched the birds' shadows flit across her face, and I...wanted. I wanted more happy memories to hang up on the ceiling, so many happy memories with this girl that they would crowd the ceiling and flap out into the hall and burst out of the house.

I want everything about you, Aurora. I want your smiles. Your laughs. I want the way you ramble when you’re nervous. I want your big reactions and your little ones. I want to watch you get frustrated at origami but carry on anyway because it makes you so happy. I want to protect you possums and sharks and, sometimes, when you need it, yourself. And I want to want you because you’re worth it, sweetheart. And you make me feel good, too.

For a while we just lie there, not talking, the two of us folded perfectly into each other, human origami.

Let fear defeat you not. —Origami Yoda

It doesn’t matter if you make a mess. It matters that you fix it. Maybe the whole point of approaching life as origami that the documentary had missed was learning to fold your sharp edges.

Your mother is in the bedside chair. She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds. Using a long needle, she is stringing brightly origami cranes into garlands. It's a Japanese custom called senbazaru. If you make one thousand paper cranes, you can restore someone to good health.

See, this is what I love about him, the way his mind twists everything, as if life were made up of meaningless scraps of paper that turn into tiny origami models the moment he starts folding them.

And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don't think it looks like a series of folded-over mistakes and do-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead, I think we'll conclude in the end that maybe we're all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better.

Like a master of origami who can take a simple square of paper and turn it into an intricate network of folded angles to create a dragon, I can take a minuscule problem in my life and turn it into a massive complication.

So, what do you do when you're too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing? You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can't with your body. You diet. You starve, you run till you taste blood in your throat, you count out your almonds, you try to buy back your humanity with pounds of flesh.

I love to read books! There are so many authors that I think are really fun to read.

De eso se trata, de coincidir con gente que te haga ver cosas que tú no ves. Que te enseñen a mirar con otros ojos.

I hate when I'm not done with my cup but my mom decides to put it in the dishwasher anyway and the cup isn't dishwasher safe. I keep telling my mom that my origami coffee mugs are hand wash ONLY. Handshakes are also hand wash only. -Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo.

Os encapuzados podiam tudo em sua pregação da barbárie. Os jornais, quando muito, dedicavam notas aos casos, sem jamais incentivar a investigação. Mais tarde, ao se perceberem impunes, eles ampliaram o campo de ação. Mulheres e homens negros, nordestinos, homossexuais, ateus, transexuais, pesquisadores, jornalistas… Dobradores de origamis. Para os fundamentalistas, o outro era sempre o inimigo. E o inimigo merecia a morte.

You are quarter ghost on your mother’s side. Your heart is a flayed peach in a bone box. Your hair comes away in clumps like cheap fabric wet. A reflecting pool gathers around your altar of plywood sub flooring and split wooden slats. You are rag doll prone. You are contort, angle and arc. Here you rot. Here you are a greening abdomen, slipping skin, flesh fly, carrion beetles. This is where bullets take shelter, where scythes find their function, breath loses its place on the page. This is where the page is torn out of every book before chapter’s close, this is slippage, this is a shroud of neglect pulled over the body, this is your chance to escape. Little wraith, bend light around your skin until it colors you clear, disappear like silica in a kiln, become glass and glass beads, become the staggered whir of an exhaust fan: something only noticed when gone. Become an origami swan. Fold yourself smaller than ever before. Become less. More in some ways but less in the way a famine is less. They will forgive you for not being satisfied with fitting in their hands. They will forgive you for dying to be a bird diminutive enough to fit in a mouth and not be crushed.

In one sense, burglars seem to understand architecture better than the rest of us. They misuse it, pass through it, and ignore any limitations a building tries to impose. Burglars don’t need doors; they’ll punch holes through walls or slice down through ceilings instead. Burglars unpeel a building from the inside out to hide inside the drywall (or underneath the floorboards, or up in the trusses of an unlit crawl space). They are masters of architectural origami, demonstrating skills the rest of us only wish we had, dark wizards of cities and buildings, unlimited by laws that hold the rest of us in.

I know a man who used to be a millionaire before 2007. Now he’s poor and mopping floors. But I’m not laughing, because at least he was able to get a job. Unlike me, who only has an English degree that’s not even worth the paper it’s printed on, the paper I folded into an origami dragon and lit on fire.

And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait might fold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

He closed his eyes. Found the ridged face of the power stud. And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information. Please, he prayed, now- A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Now- Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of the military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

À quoi sert-il d'avoir si être nous manque.

For some reason, anytime an adult decides you are 'representing' something, they decide you should represent it by being as quiet and boring as possible.

La fente, comme tracée au tire-ligne, cette superbe couture rabattue, qui s'épanouira un jour en pétales et, au fil du temps, deviendra le con de la femme, un pliage d'origami.

though some wicked master of a form of origami akin to quantum mechanics spent the night folding the evils of the world into places that had once been less afflicted by them.

his long cock slamming into me. He bent down, folding me up like a piece of origami.

I muri che hai intorno sono solo origami di carta, bruciali. Brucia tutto l’appartamento se vuoi, io non ci tornerò, vola via. Liberati. E ama. Brucia. Brucia. Brucia. Brucia.

Os eventos nos desnaturam, me obrigando a assumir uma outra forma de origami.

Sydney directed the cars through the intersection—through the air—with words, with small precise gestures that bent her fingers and hands into severe origami, with no obvious effort.

I keep quiet and look out the window. The light is weak and watery-looking, like the sun hast just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. The shadows are as sharp and pointed as needles. I watch three black crows take off simultaneausly from a telephone wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane, folding and compressing into itself like an origami figure, until everything is flat and brightly colored - until the world is like a drawing of itself

A date?” she says. “Yes. A real date.” “With me?” “With you.” “Even though I gave you origami golden retrievers and an old moth-eaten book on presidents for your birthday?” “Especially because of those things.

I knew where Rose was—the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything

the six of us are supposed to drive to the diner in Hastings for lunch. But the moment we enter the cavernous auditorium where the girls told us to meet them, my jaw drops and our plans change. “Holy shit—is that a red velvet chaise lounge?” The guys exchange a WTF look. “Um…sure?” Justin says. “Why—” I’m already sprinting toward the stage. The girls aren’t here yet, which means I have to act fast. “For fuck’s sake, get over here,” I call over my shoulder. Their footsteps echo behind me, and by the time they climb on the stage, I’ve already whipped my shirt off and am reaching for my belt buckle. I stop to fish my phone from my back pocket and toss it at Garrett, who catches it without missing a beat. “What is happening right now?” Justin bursts out. I drop trou, kick my jeans away, and dive onto the plush chair wearing nothing but my black boxer-briefs. “Quick. Take a picture.” Justin doesn’t stop shaking his head. Over and over again, and he’s blinking like an owl, as if he can’t fathom what he’s seeing. Garrett, on the other hand, knows better than to ask questions. Hell, he and Hannah spent two hours constructing origami hearts with me the other day. His lips twitch uncontrollably as he gets the phone in position. “Wait.” I pause in thought. “What do you think? Double guns, or double thumbs up?” “What is happening?” We both ignore Justin’s baffled exclamation. “Show me the thumbs up,” Garrett says. I give the camera a wolfish grin and stick up my thumbs. My best friend’s snort bounces off the auditorium walls. “Veto. Do the guns. Definitely the guns.” He takes two shots—one with flash, one without—and just like that, another romantic gesture is in the bag. As I hastily put my clothes back on, Justin rubs his temples with so much vigor it’s as if his brain has imploded. He gapes as I tug my jeans up to my hips. Gapes harder when I walk over to Garrett so I can study the pictures. I nod in approval. “Damn. I should go into modeling.” “You photograph really well,” Garrett agrees in a serious voice. “And dude, your package looks huge.” Fuck, it totally does. Justin drags both hands through his dark hair. “I swear on all that is holy—if one of you doesn’t tell me what the hell just went down here, I’m going to lose my shit.” I chuckle. “My girl wanted me to send her a boudoir shot of me on a red velvet chaise lounge, but you have no idea how hard it is to find a goddamn red velvet chaise lounge.” “You say this as if it’s an explanation. It is not.” Justin sighs like the weight of the world rests on his shoulders. “You hockey players are fucked up.” “Naah, we’re just not pussies like you and your football crowd,” Garrett says sweetly. “We own our sex appeal, dude.” “Sex appeal? That was the cheesiest thing I’ve ever—no, you know what? I’m not gonna engage,” Justin grumbles. “Let’s find the girls and grab some lunch

Lettie Hempstock’s ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was—where the universe began, to the sound of uncreated voices singing in the void—and I knew where Rose was—the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang,

Our Kind Dictator rarely dictated Himself, as word-clumsy as ever, sentences like origami as His thoughts as vast as cosmic planes compress fold on fold, tighter, tighter, into the deceptive smallness of a crane, or frog, or noun.

When I came home in the evening we ate dinner together. She moved some of her clothing into my room, some T-shirts and clean underwear. In bed we folded around each other like origami. It's possible to feel so grateful that you can't get to sleep at night.

I've learned that God sometimes allows us to find ourselves in a place where we want something so bad that we can't see past it. Sometimes we can't even see God because of it. When we want something so bad, it's easy to mistake what we truly need for the thing we really want. When this sort of thing happens, and it seems to happen to everyone, I've found it's because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road. In the Bible, the people following God had the same problem I did. They swapped the real thing for an image of the real thing. We target the wrong thing and our misdirected life's goal ends up looking like a girl or a wide-brimmed hat or a golden calf. All along, what God really wants for us is something much different, something more tailored for us. [...] And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don't think it looks like a series of folded-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead I think we'll conclude in the end that maybe we're all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better.

Prose vs. Poetry To a writer of prose a flower is a flower. To a poet a flower can be the origami of God's eye enfolding the cosmos; it is the luminous well of imagination bursting into pattern; it is the coalescence of infinite possibility into palpable reality; it is a confetti forest for dancing bumble bees; it is the flirtatious blush ofradial symmetry; it is the heartache of love manifest in a rose. For a true poet A FLOWER IS NOT A FLOWER.

The second thing I thought was that I knew everything. Lettie Hempstock’s ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was—where the universe began, to the sound of uncreated voices singing in the void—and I knew where Rose was—the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang, which would be, I knew now, nothing of the kind.

where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair into my sister, where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled violin, where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no more dead lovers than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions, where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists, where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be torn down swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle, I understand only this: It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast. from "The Origami Fields

Awe empowers sacrifice, and inspires us to give that most precious of resources, time. Memphis University professor Jia Wei Zhang and I brought people to a lab where they were surrounded by either awe-inspiring plants or less-inspiring ones. As participants were leaving the lab, we asked if they would fold origami cranes to be sent to victims of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Being surrounded with awe-inspiring plants led people to volunteer more time. The last pillar of the default self—striving for competitive advantage, registered in a stinginess toward giving away possessions and time—crumbles during awe. Awe awakens the better angels of our nature.

Reaching into the bag, I pull out my present: a yellow origami dog. “Oh my God, is it Fish?” She leans over to peek into the bag, reaching in and pulling out two smaller yellow dogs, placing them on my palm too. “This is incredible.” “I tried to make possums, but nobody could tell what they were supposed to be.” I let her hold the origami as I pull out something else from the bag. “Okay, so I can’t lie, I stole this from the old library that nobody uses and it’s older than both of us combined.” I read from the cover. “Learn all thirty-seven presidents: for ages six to ten.” “I know how much you love naming presidents.” She gives me a look that makes me want to say fuck the party.

Every year Grandma Ann (not blood related but our grandmother all the same) made extravagant paper hats out of recycled material; the mesh netting of pears, colored comics, indigo feathers, origami flowers. She sold them at street fairs and donated the proceeds to local organizations, including Grateful Garments, which provided clothes for survivors of sexual violence. Had this organization not existed, I would have left the hospital wearing nothing but a flimsy gown and boots. Which meant all the hours spent cutting and taping hats at the dinner table, selling them at a little booth in the sun, had gifted me a gentle suit of armor. Grandma Ann wrapped herself around me, told me I was ready.

Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not-love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

I know I’m supposed to be so smart, but guess what? I don’t remember any of it! And double-guess what? I’m totally fine now, and have been for nine and a half years. Just take a time-out and ponder that. For two-thirds of my life I’ve been totally normal. Mom and Dad bring me back to Children’s every year for an echocardiogram and X rays that even the cardiologist rolls her eyes at because I don’t need them. Walking through the halls, Mom is always, like, having a Vietnam flashback. We’ll pass some random piece of art hanging on the wall and she’ll grab onto a chair and say, Oh, God, that Milton Avery poster. Or, gulping a big breath, That ficus tree had origami cranes hanging on it that awful Christmas. And then she’ll close her eyes while everyone just stands there, and Dad hugs her really tight, tears flooding his eyes, too.

Human Origami It’s hard to come in second. . . . While painful at the time, I can see now, many years later when I look in the rearview mirror of my life, evidence of God’s tremendous love and unfolding adventure for me. I’ve received many letters . . . in my life that started out “Dear Bob.” Some were letters so thick they had to be folded several times to fit in the envelope. They left me feeling as folded when I read their words with shattering disappointment. Still, whatever follows my “Dear Bobs” is often another reminder that God’s grace comes in all shapes, sizes, and circumstances as God continues to unfold something magnificent in me. And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don’t think it looks like a series of folded-over mistakes and do-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead, I think we’ll conclude in the end that maybe we’re all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better. BOB GOFF Love Does

Because between 'reality' on one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And - I would argue as well - all love. Or perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not love, there and not there. Photographs on the wall, a balled up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached out to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly the middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Because, between 'reality' on one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And - I would argue as well - all love. Or perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly the middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Marple closed her eyes and fell asleep. It felt good. She felt like a kid again. She’d waited a long time to feel like that. It felt like the universe was folding in on itself. It felt like origami birds being born. —from THE IMMORTALS ACT THEIR AGE

I began to see all of this, and the beauty of clinging to one another, and my life was a sheet of paper being folded into an origami crane and I was beginning to believe I could fly.

I could kill you with the ink pen by the cash register, a dirty glass, or a used napkin folded in the shape of a motherfucking swan. And don’t think I wouldn’t have enough time to do some origami, shove it down your goddamn throat and watch you choke on it before you could move.

So, what do you do when you’re too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing? You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can’t with your body.

Origami is the art of folding uncut sheets of paper into decorative objects such as birds or animals.

She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams.

artists of the modern era have carried origami to unprecedented heights of realism and complexity.

Almost any subject is suitable for an origami model, despite the stringent limitation of using an uncut sheet,

Origami artists have made birds 1/64th of an inch long, and life-size elephants three yards high.

Until now, I constructed my existence carefully, tucking and folding every loose and disorderly bit of it, as if building some tight and airless piece of origami. I had labored over its creation. I was proud of how it looked. But it was delicate. If one corner came untucked I might discover that I was restless. If another popped loose, it might reveal I was uncertain about the professional path I’d so deliberately put myself on, about all the things I told myself I wanted.

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

So, it turns out I’m kind of dying,” I say to her. I haven’t spoken this directly to anyone yet. “Yeah,” she says. “So, what’s up with that? Why do you always have to be the first of us to do everything?” “Can you teach me how to make origami cranes?” I say. “I thought you would never ask,” she says.

rare is the schoolchild who has never folded a hat, boat, plane or the ubiquitous fortune-teller or “cootie-catcher.

Ideas in the mind only, are like the worthless place that can only be enjoyed by an individual as good fantasy.

Always remember, a tired mind can procrastinate the energetic body, but a good mind also develops with the energetic body.

Mas had seen photographs and video footage of the skeletal remains of the Atomic Bomb Dome, the building that miraculously survived the blast, and of the Sadako monument, her arms stretched out, holding a giant origami crane above her head. All of these memorials had been either preserved or produced after his time. They were for future generations, the ones who hadn't experienced what could happen in a split second. Giant waves and the shaking of the ground could still destroy cities, but that was at the hands of Mother Nature. It was entirely different when the engine of destruction was human— different because it calculated and planned for reasons both good and evil. But when that power was unleashed, who would it touch? It touched them all—the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. And even more frightening, it sent out a sickness that polluted your body, mind, and soul, and maybe also the generations to come.

All the information for embryonic development is contained within the fertilized egg. So how is this information interpreted to give rise to an embryo? Does the DNA contain a full description of the organism to which it will give rise; is it a blueprint for the organism? The answer is no. Instead, the fertilized egg contains a program of instructions for making the organism—a generative program—that determines where and when different proteins are synthesized and thus controls how cells behave. A descriptive program such as a blueprint or a plan describes an object in some detail, whereas a generative program describes how to make an object. For the same object, the programs are very different. Consider origami, the art of paper folding. By folding a piece of paper in various directions it is quite easy to make a paper hat or a bird from a single sheet. To describe in any detail the final form simply by marking regions on the flat piece of paper is really very difficult, and not of much help in explaining how to achieve it. Much more useful and easier to formulate are instructions on how to fold the paper. The reason for this is that simple instructions about folding have complex spatial consequences. In development, gene action similarly sets in motion a sequence of events that can bring about profound changes in the embryo. One can thus think of the genetic information in the fertilized egg as equivalent to the folding instructions in origami; both contain a generative program for making a particular structure.

Can I ask you something?” Gibson said. “How did you make me so fast?” “Ye didn’t belong there,” Bobby replied. “Yeah, but how did you know?” “Because ye said hello to no one, and no one said hello to you.” Gibson had to laugh. It was so simple, yet it would take someone perceptive and alert to pick up on it in a pub so crowded. Uncle Bobby might like to play the drunken buffoon, but there was more to him than met the eye.

Until now, I’d constructed my existence carefully, tucking and folding every loose and disorderly bit of it, as if building some tight and airless piece of origami. I had labored over its creation. I was proud of how it looked. But it was delicate. If one corner came untucked, I might discover that I was restless. If another popped loose, it might reveal I was uncertain about the professional path I’d so deliberately put myself on, about all the things I told myself I wanted. I think now it’s why I guarded myself so carefully, why I still wasn’t ready to let him in. He was like a wind that threatened to unsettle everything.

What, now I had to spell it out? Talk about humiliating. “My mother tried to describe me in a glowing light: She went through all my virtues.” “I’ve got that,” he said. “Especially the part about obedient and respectful . . .” “Never mind that. She went through the whole list. If I could do origami, she would’ve mentioned it, too.” “Okay, and?” “Did she tell you I was pretty?” He gave me a blank look. “Did the word pretty come out of her mouth? At all?” “No,” Jim said.