Realize What You Lost Quotes

Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

It's okay,' he tells me. 'If you want to go. Everyone wants you to stay. I want you to stay more than I've ever wanted anything in my life.' His voice cracks with emotion. He stops, clears his throat, takes a breath, and continues. 'But that's what I want and I could see why it might not be what you want. So I just wanted to tell you that I understand if you go. It's okay if you have to leave us. It's okay if you want to stop fighting.' For the first time since I realized that Teddy was gone, too, I feel something unclench. I feel myself breathe. I know that Gramps can't be that late-inning pinch hitter I'd hoped for. He won't unplug my breathing tube or overdoes me with morphine or anything like that. But this is the first time today that anyone has acknowledged what I have lost. I know that the social worker warned Gran and Gramps not to upset me, but Gramps's recognition, and the permission he just offered me--it feels like a gift. Gramps doesn't leave me. He slumps back into the chair. It's quiet now. So quiet you can almost hear other people's dreams. So quiet that you can almost hear me tell Gramps, 'Thank you.

If I should have a daughter…“Instead of “Mom”, she’s gonna call me “Point B.” Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I’m going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.” She’s gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried. And “Baby,” I’ll tell her “don’t keep your nose up in the air like that, I know that trick, you’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else, find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him.” But I know that she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boats nearby, ‘cause there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix. Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks chocolate can’t fix. But that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything if you let it. I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat, to look through a magnifying glass at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a human mind. Because that’s how my mom taught me. That there’ll be days like this, “There’ll be days like this my momma said” when you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say “thank you,” ‘cause there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away. You will put the “wind” in win some lose some, you will put the “star” in starting over and over, and no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am pretty damn naive but I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. “Baby,” I’ll tell her “remember your mama is a worrier but your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.” Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and always apologize when you’ve done something wrong but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing and when they finally hand you heartbreak, slip hatred and war under your doorstep and hand you hand-outs on street corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.

Lost in thought, it took her several moments to realize that Jace had been saying something to her. When she blinked at him, she saw a wry grin spread across his face. "What?" she asked, ungraciously. "I wish you'd stop desperately trying to get my attention like this," he said. "It's become embarrassing." "Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt," she told him. "I can't help it. I use my rapier wit to hide my inner pain." "Your pain will be outer soon if you don't get out of traffic. Are you trying to get run over by a cab?" "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "We could never get a cab that easily in this neighborhood.

I used to think I knew everything. I was a "smart person" who "got things done," and because of that, the higher I climbed, the more I could look down and scoff at what seemed silly or simple, even religion. But I realized something as I drove home that night: that I am neither better nor smarter, only luckier. And I should be ashamed of thinking I knew everything, because you can know the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain-no matter how smart or accomplished-they cry, they yearn, they hurt.But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things:comfort, love, and a peaceful heart.

Do you have any idea what it feels like to suddenly realize that the reason you’ve have been so lost your whole life is because a piece of you was missing and you never even knew it—only to find that missing piece and know that you can’t have it and so you will never, ever be whole?

I wish I could give you a world where everything was perfect and shining and safe. I used to think that's what we had..." He shook his head. "I've realized now that our world doesn't define us. We define our world. And I hope you'll fill yours with as much light and happiness as you can." "You realize how silly that sounds, right?" "I do. But after everything that's happened, I think we could all use a bit more silly in our lives.

So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together. In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page: I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page. Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND… I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too.

You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens. These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays 1. A beginning ends what an end begins. 2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full. 3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself. 4. The best time is stolen time. 5. All work is the avoidance of harder work. 6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing. 7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music. 8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear? 9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation. 10. Writer: how books read each other. 11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love. 12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything. 13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough. 14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear. 15. There are silences harder to take back than words. 16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery. 17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself. 18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. 19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism. 20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do. 21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of. 22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday. 23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open). 24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?

Halt?" said Gilan, realization dawning. "You're not seasick are you?" No," Halt said shortly, not trusting himself beyond one syllable. Probably need a bite if breakfast to settle your stomach," Svengal said helpfully. "Gte something solid inside you." Had...breakfast." This time Halt managed three syllables-but with some difficulty, Svengal affected no notice. Cabbage is god. Especially pickled cabbage. Sits on the gut nicely," he said. "Goes well with a nice piece of greasy bacon. You should try that if you..." But before he could finish, Halt lurched toward the ship's rail and hung over it. Dreaful noises were torn from him. Svengal, still affecting a look of innocence, turned to Gilan, hands spread and eyes wide. What it the world is he looking for? Has he lost something, do you think?

Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

To my son, If you are reading this letter, then I am dead. I expect to die, if not today, then soon. I expect that Valentine will kill me. For all his talk of loving me, for all his desire for a right-hand man, he knows that I have doubts. And he is a man who cannot abide doubt. I do not know how you will be brought up. I do not know what they will tell you about me. I do not even know who will give you this letter. I entrust it to Amatis, but I cannot see what the future holds. All I know is that this is my chance to give you an accounting of a man you may well hate. There are three things you must know about me. The first is that I have been a coward. Throughout my life I have made the wrong decisions, because they were easy, because they were self-serving, because I was afraid. At first I believed in Valentine’s cause. I turned from my family and to the Circle because I fancied myself better than Downworlders and the Clave and my suffocating parents. My anger against them was a tool Valentine bent to his will as he bent and changed so many of us. When he drove Lucian away I did not question it but gladly took his place for my own. When he demanded I leave Amatis, the woman I love, and marry Celine, a girl I did not know, I did as he asked, to my everlasting shame. I cannot imagine what you might be thinking now, knowing that the girl I speak of was your mother. The second thing you must know is this. Do not blame Celine for any of this, whatever you do. It was not her fault, but mine. Your mother was an innocent from a family that brutalized her. She wanted only kindess, to feel safe and loved. And though my heart had been given already, I loved her, in my fashion, just as in my heart, I was faithful to Amatis. Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae. I wonder if you love Latin as I do, and poetry. I wonder who has taught you. The third and hardest thing you must know is that I was prepared to hate you. The son of myslef and the child-bride I barely knew, you seemed to be the culmination of all the wrong decisions I had made, all the small compromises that led to my dissolution. Yet as you grew inside my mind, as you grew in the world, a blameless innocent, I began to realize that I did not hate you. It is the nature of parents to see their own image in their children, and it was myself I hated, not you. For there is only one thing I wan from you, my son — one thing from you, and of you. I want you to be a better man than I was. Let no one else tell you who you are or should be. Love where you wish to. Believe as you wish to. Take freedom as your right. I don’t ask that you save the world, my boy, my child, the only child I will ever have. I ask only that you be happy. Stephen

You know, when I first met you, in Idris, I had hopes—I had thought you would be like me. And when you were nothing like me, I hated you. And then, when I was brought back, and Jace told me what you did, I realized that I had been wrong. You are like me.

Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside of her. But there was no release. Table, ivory, elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily...None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness. If we were to open a random page in her journal- which she must have kept and kept with her at all times, not fearing that it would be lost, or discovered and read, but that she would one day stumble upon that thing which was finally worth writing about and remembering, only to find that she had no place to write it- we would find some rendering of the following sentiment: I am not in love.

what love looks like what does love look like the therapist asks one week after the breakup and i’m not sure how to answer her question except for the fact that i thought love looked so much like you that’s when it hit me and i realized how naive i had been to place an idea so beautiful on the image of a person as if anybody on this entire earth could encompass all love represented as if this emotion seven billion people tremble for would look like a five foot eleven medium-sized brown-skinned guy who likes eating frozen pizza for breakfast what does love look like the therapist asks again this time interrupting my thoughts midsentence and at this point i’m about to get up and walk right out the door except i paid too much money for this hour so instead i take a piercing look at her the way you look at someone when you’re about to hand it to them lips pursed tightly preparing to launch into conversation eyes digging deeply into theirs searching for all the weak spots they have hidden somewhere hair being tucked behind the ears as if you have to physically prepare for a conversation on the philosophies or rather disappointments of what love looks like well i tell her i don’t think love is him anymore if love was him he would be here wouldn’t he if he was the one for me wouldn’t he be the one sitting across from me if love was him it would have been simple i don’t think love is him anymore i repeat i think love never was i think i just wanted something was ready to give myself to something i believed was bigger than myself and when i saw someone who probably fit the part i made it very much my intention to make him my counterpart and i lost myself to him he took and he took wrapped me in the word special until i was so convinced he had eyes only to see me hands only to feel me a body only to be with me oh how he emptied me how does that make you feel interrupts the therapist well i said it kind of makes me feel like shit maybe we’re looking at it wrong we think it’s something to search for out there something meant to crash into us on our way out of an elevator or slip into our chair at a cafe somewhere appear at the end of an aisle at the bookstore looking the right amount of sexy and intellectual but i think love starts here everything else is just desire and projection of all our wants needs and fantasies but those externalities could never work out if we didn’t turn inward and learn how to love ourselves in order to love other people love does not look like a person love is our actions love is giving all we can even if it’s just the bigger slice of cake love is understanding we have the power to hurt one another but we are going to do everything in our power to make sure we don’t love is figuring out all the kind sweetness we deserve and when someone shows up saying they will provide it as you do but their actions seem to break you rather than build you love is knowing who to choose

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely. During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go round with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me." "If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

He hadn’t stopped wanting love. He had simply, somehow, stopped looking. He wondered if you could be exhausted without knowing it, if hope could be lost not all at once but could slip away gradually, day by day, and vanish before you ever realized.

I don't know if I've ever really touched him. Maybe once or twice when passing papers back. You know, even shorter, his hair looks so soft. Maybe it's time I rub it a little. So I can give more concrete details. I stretch my hand across my desk, but stop when I realize the horror of what I was about to do. Pet Sean. Have I lost my mind?

I can't pretend like it never happened" I told her. "You shouldn't - you should never forget. But part of surviving is being able to move on. There's is this word: "nothing like it exists in the English language. It's Portuguese. SAUDADE. Do you know that one?" "It's more ... there's no perfect definition. Its more of an expression of feeling-of terrible sadness. Its the felling you get when you realize something you once lost is lost forever, and you can never get it back again." It's true that you can't reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.

Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.

Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be honest and polite. But what they don't realize is no matter how much they try, their kids will get out there. Out to this complicated little world. If they are lucky they will survive, through backstabbers, broken hearts, failures and all the kinds of invisible insane pressures out there. But most kids get lost in them. They will get caught up in all kinds of bubbles. Trouble bubbles. Bubbles that continuously tell them that they are not good enough. Bubbles that get them carried away with what they think is love, give them broken hearts. Bubbles that will blur the rest of the world to them, make them feel like that is it, that they've reached the end. Sometimes, even the really smart kids, make stupid decisions. They lose control. Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second of every day. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives. You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality.

Sometimes you need to accept what you’ve lost, then move forward. Then you can instead realize what you’ve gained.

Be a part of the world, but never in it. Because of what we do, we have to interact with people. But we must be unseen shadows who move among them. Never let anyone know you. Never give them a chance to realize you don’t age. Move through the darkness ever watchful, ever alert. We are all that stands between the humans and slavery. Without us, they all die and their souls are lost forever. Our responsibilities are great. Out battles numerous and legendary. But at the end of the night, you go home alone where no one knows what it is you have done to save the world that fears you. You can never bask in your glory. You can never know love or family. We are Dark-Hunters. We are forever powerful. We are forever alone. (Acheron)

You're lost, brother. You're a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It's gone." He paused beside Robin on his way to the door. His fingers landed on Robin's shoulder, squeezed so hard they hurt. "But realize this, brother. You fly no one's flag. You're free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.

What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.

The Standover Man. all my life, I've been scared of men standing over me. I suppose my first standover man was my father, but he vanished before I could remember him. For some reason when I was a boy, I liked to fight. a lot of the time, I lost. Another boy, sometimes with blood falling from his nose, would be standing over me. Many years later, I needed to hide. I tried not to sleep because I as afraid of who might be there when I woke up. But I was lucky. It was always my friend.When I was hiding. I dreamed of a certain man. The hardest was when I traveled to find him. Out of sheer luck and many footsteps, I made it. I slept there for a long time. Three days, they told me...and what did I find when I woke up? Not a man, but someone else standing over me. As time passed by the girl and I realized we had things in common. But there is one strange thing. The girl says I look like something else. Now I live in a basement. Bad dreams still live in my sleep. One night, after my usual nightmare, a shadow stood above me. She said, "Tell me what you dream of." So I did. In return, she explained what her own dreams were made of. Now I think we are friends, this girl and me. It was she who gave me a gift - to me. It makes me understand that the best standover man I've ever known is not a man at all...

Love, he realized, was like the daggers he made in his forge: When you first got one it was shiny and new and the blade glinted bright in the light. Holding it against your palm, you were full of optimism for what it would be like in the field, and you couldn't wait to try it out. Except those first couple of nights out were usually awkward as you got used to it and it got used to you. Over time, the steel lost its brand-new gleam, and the hilt became stained, and maybe you nicked the shit out of the thing a couple of times. What you got in return, however, saved your life: Once the pair of you were well acquainted, it became such a part of you that it was an extension of your own arm. It protected you and gave you a means to protect your brothers; it provided you with the confidnece and the power to face whatever came out of the night; and wherever you went, it stayed with you, right over your heart, always there when you needed it. You had to keep the blade up, however. And rewrap the hilt from time to time. And double-check the weight. Funny...all of that was well, duh when it came to weapons. Why hadn't it dawned on him that matings were the same? (From the thoughts of Vishous)

Life…we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.

We realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.

If you really believed that you'd lost your soul, then when I found you in Volterra, you would have realized immediately what was happening, instead of thinking we were both dead together. But you didn't―you said 'Amazing. Carlisle was right,'" I reminded him, triumphant. "There's hope in you, after all." For once, Edward was speechless. "So let's both just be hopeful, all right?" I suggested. "Not that it matters. If you stay, I don't need heaven." He got up slowly, and came to put his hand on either side of my face as he stared into my eyes. "Forever," he vowed, still a little staggered. "That's all I'm asking for," I said, and stretched up on my toes so that I could press my lips to his.

He bent his face into the curve of my neck. “We don’t deserve anything Rowen. We don’t deserve punishment, we don’t deserve happiness, life owes us nothing. Realize that.” His voice wasn’t gentle anymore; it was as strong as I’d ever heard it. “So we have to take what we want because life sure as shit isn’t going to freely hand it over.” He kissed the skin just above my collar bone. “And I want you.

One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened. I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream. — Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God

You say people's struggles are a game! That's totally wrong! Facing yourself no matter how tough things get... and keeping up the fight... that's what games are really about! You bet your chip of life as if it meant nothing! You lost to yourself! When you realized you were going to lose, you didn't have the courage to keep living! Listen... Real courage is protecting that chip you have in your hands... no matter what!" -Anzu to Kaiba

A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system. If you're waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it's a goal. If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure. All I'm suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

I feel sorry for people who maintain relationships and friendships detrimental to their mental health. Everyone is guilty of it at one time or another- but the idea is to strive to be your best; right? So, meanwhile why are so many people faking it? Security? Fear of loneliness? Fears of independence? Fears of being self ? Or just the idea that you can make someone change? Regardless of the justifications you give & treat yourself to... , I hope all of you - "new year -new me types" strive for self care , honest and pure friendships and relationships based of love- and not based off the fake realities of your mind. These delusions of what you hope for instead of what's there, where you and your puppet show master focus more on everyone else and less on self. To change the world you must start within. But you must first BE HONEST with yourself. My new year started a few months ago-- and it was the best choice I ever made- and I hope your recreations are progressive and successful in THE NEW YEAR

She said, “Do you see how I’m wearing this apron? It means I’m working. For a living.” The unconcerned expression didn’t flag. He said, “I’ll take care of it.” She echoed, “Take care of it?” “Yeah. How much do you make in an hour? I’ll take care of it. And I’ll talk to your manager.” For a moment, Blue was actually lost for words. She had never believed people who claimed to be speechless, but she was. She opened her mouth, and at first, all that came out was air. Then something like the beginning of a laugh. Then finally, she managed to sputter, “I am not a prostitute.” The Aglionby boy appeared puzzled for a long moment, and then realization dawned. “Oh, that was not how I meant it. That is not what I said.” “That is what you said! You think you can just pay me to talk to your friend? Clearly you pay most of your female companions by the hour and don’t know how it works with the real world, but . . . but . . .” Blue remembered that she was working to a point, but now what that point was. Indignation had eliminated all higher functions and all that remained was the desire to slap him. The boy opened his mouth to protest, and her thought came back to her all in a rush. “Most girls, when they’re interested in a guy, will sit with them for free.” To his credit, the Aglionby boy didn’t speak right away. Instead, he thought for a moment and then he said, without heat, “You said you were working for living. I thought it’d be rude to not take that into account. I’m sorry you’re insulted. I see where you’re coming from, but I feel it’s a little unair that you’re not doing the same for me.” “I feel you’re being condescending,” Blue said. In the background, she caught a glimpse of Soldier Boy making a plane of his hand. It was crashing and weaving toward the table surface while Smudgy Boy gulped laughter down. The elegant boy held his palm over his face in exaggerated horror, fingers spread just enough that she could see him wince. “Dear God,” remarked Cell Phone boy. “I don’t know what else to say.” “Sorry,” she recommended. “I said that already.” Blue considered. “Then ‘bye.’” He made a little gesture at his chest that she thought was supposed to mean he was curtsying or bowing or something sarcastically gentleman-like.

Suddenly I realized, horrified, that Darry was crying. He didn’t make a sound, but tears were running down his cheeks. I hadn’t seen him cry in years, not even when Mom and Dad had been killed. (I remembered the funeral. I had sobbed in spite of myself; Soda had broken down and bawled like a baby; but Darry had only stood there, his fists in his pockets and that look on his face, the same helpless, pleading look that he was wearing now.) In that second what Soda and Dally and Two-Bit had been trying to tell me came through. Darry did care about me, maybe as much as he cared about Soda, and because he cared he was trying too hard to make something of me. When he yelled “Pony, where have you been all this time?” he meant “Pony, you’ve scared me to death. Please be careful, because I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.” Darry looked down and turned away silently. Suddenly I broke out of my daze. “Darry!” I screamed, and the next thing I knew I had him around the waist and was squeezing the daylights out of him. “Darry,” I said, “I’m sorry . . .” He was stroking my hair and I could hear the sobs racking him as he fought to keep back the tears. “Oh, Pony, I thought we’d lost you . . . like we did Mom and Dad . . .” That was his silent fear then—of losing another person he loved. I remembered how close he and Dad had been, and I wondered how I could ever have thought him hard and unfeeling. I listened to his heart pounding through his T-shirt and knew everything was going to be okay now. I had taken the long way around, but I was finally home. To stay.

You are the best. You are the worst. You are average. Your love is a part of you. You try to give it away because you cannot bear its radiance, but you cannot separate it from yourself. To understand your fellow humans, you must understand why you give them your love. You must realize that hate is but a crime-ridden subdivision of love. You must reclaim what you never lost. You must take leave of your sanity, and yet be fully responsible for your action.

The key to valuing something is to lose it and then realize how rare it was—after which you pray like mad to regain what you foolishly lost. The value of an item often depends upon how hard it is to attain.

With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y. 'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said. 'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

I think as you get older you become more of who you always were. You become a more concentrated version of yourself. You really learn who you are, why you're unique, who you've always been [...] There's a winnowing away of nonessentials, sometimes essentials, it's true, but what remains is your core, your essence, the real 'you,' and you realize you're still you without what you've lost as long as you still have all your marbles--or most of them anyway.

Brilliant blue gazes met. “I swear before you and God that I will. But if something should happen, and this morning should go awry, promise me you’ll take care of her. Promise me you’ll tell her…” Ralston paused. “Tell her what?” Ralston took a deep breath, the words bringing a tightening in his chest. “Promise me you’ll tell her that I was an idiot. That the money didn’t matter. That, last night, faced with the terrifying possibility that I had lost her…I realized that she was the most important thing I had ever had…because of my arrogance and my unwillingness to accept what has been in my heart for too long…” He trailed off. “What the hell have I done?” “It appears that you’ve gone and fallen in love.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things - to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

I dont think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost...I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing. Like Katherine. That's what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn't fill the hole that losing her created.

What I'm trying to realize is that it's okay to be different. If everyone were the same, we'd all make the same mistakes. Instead we all face our own things, and that's not so bad because we have people who care about us to help us through. You have that, Keefe. We're all here for you. No matter what." -Sophie Foster

A soldier pulled a gun, and I lifted mine, squeezing off a round. The kickback startled me. The bullet hit the guy in the leg. Daemon lost his hold on Nancy’s form, slipping into his own. His eyes were wide as he stared at me. “What?” I asked. “You didn’t think I’d do it?” ... “Didn’t realize you shooting a gun would be so sexy.

When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent. I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.

We want you to tell us about vampires." Simon grinned. "What do you want to know? Scariest is Eli in Let the Right One In, cheesiest is late-era Lestat, most underrated is David Bowie in The Hunger. Sexiest is definitely Drusilla, though if you ask a girl, she'll probably say Damon Salvatore or Edward Cullen. But..." he shrugged, "You know girls." Julie's and Beatriz's eyes were wide. "I didn't think you'd know so many!" Beatriz exclaimed. "Are they... are they your friends?" "Oh, sure, Count Dracula and I are like this," Simon said, crossing his fingers to demonstrate. "Also Count Chocula. Oh, and my BFF Count Blintzula. He's a real charmer...." He trailed off as he realized no one else was laughing. In fact, no one seemed to realize he was joking. "They're from TV," he prompted them. "Or, uh, cereal." "What's he talking about?" Julie asked Jon, perfect nose wrinkling up in confusion. "Who cares?" Jon said.

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. "A memoir is the lost inheritance," you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

Listen my friend, if one person doesn’t want the relationship, then it’s simply not a fit. No sense trying to figure out why they don’t want it. No sense blaming it on their commitment issues. No sense waiting around for them to realize they wanted it after all. Because it doesn’t matter why they don’t want it. What matters is that you are met heart-on by a fully engaged partner. If they don’t want it, then you don’t want it, because you don’t want to be with someone who isn’t there for it fully. That’s the thing about love relationship— it’s an agreement that has to be signed by both souls. If one doesn’t sign, then nothing has been lost. If it’s not a fit for them, it’s not a fit for you either.

Keefe?' Amy repeated, her lips curling into a grin. 'He's the supercute blonde guy you picked up cookies for, right? The one who keeps staring at you all intense when I met him, like you were the only person that mattered to him in the entire universe?' Someone coughed near the doorway. It was probably Grady, maybe Edaline too, but Sophie decided she would rather not know who was eavesdropping. 'He doesn't stare at me like that,' she said, hoping her cheeks weren't blushing too badly. It didn't help that Ro kept cackling beside her. ... 'I swear, you have no idea how lucky you are, getting to be around so many gorgeous boys all the time. I don't know how you haven't dated any of them--or have you?' 'She tried with Fitzy,' Ro answered for her. 'But then she realized he was too boring, so they broke up.' 'That's not what happened!' Sophie argued--over lots more coughing from the doorway. 'We didn't really date. We just sort of... liked each other... openly. But then it got super complicated, so we decided to focus on being friends. ... Why are we talking about this?' Sophie asked ... 'Because it's fun watching you get all red and fidgety!' Amy told her. 'Plus, there's a chance our boy is somewhere nearby, listening to this conversation,' Ro added before she raised her voice to a shout. 'Hear that, Hunkyhair? Get your overdramatic butt back here! Your girl is single--and the great Foster Oblivion is over! This is what you've been waiting for!' 'Hunkyhair?' Amy asked, raising one eyebrow as Sophie contemplated smothering herself with her blankets. 'Great Foster Oblivion?' 'Never mind,' Sophie mumbled, sinking deeper into her blankets.

I really do forget about everything. Because that’s what a moment like this does to you. It makes you feel like something so small inside of something so massive that it’s beyond comprehension. It strips away all of your problems, all of your hardships, all of your worldly needs and wants and desires, forcing you to realize just how insignificant all of it really is. It’s like the Earth becomes completely silent and still, and all that your mind can understand or feel is the vastness of the Universe and you gasp thinking about your place within it. Who needs psychiatrists? Who needs grief counselors and life coaches and motivational speakers? Fuck all that. Just stare at the night sky and let yourself get lost in it every now and then.

I’m different. I don’t know what happened to me in Vegas. That wasn’t me. I was thinking about everything we could buy with that money, and that was all I was thinking about. I didn’t see how much it hurt you for me to want to take you back there, but deep down, I think I knew. I deserved for you to leave me. I deserved all the sleep I lost and the pain I’ve felt. I needed all that to realize how much I need you, and what I’m willing to do to keep you in my life.

Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.

So,” she mumbled, not sure how to finish that sentence – or what to do with her arms. Or where to stand. It all felt awkward and weird and wrong-until fits dropped his crutches and gently pulled her into a hug. “I don’t want to go,” he whispered. “I don’t want you to either,“ she admitted, hoping her hushed tone hit the thickness of her voice. She told herself not to pull him tighter so he wouldn’t feel how hard her heart was pounding. But she couldn’t help leaning closer when she realized his pulse felt just as crazy as hers. She didn’t know what that meant. But it felt like something.

The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is "contemplating" something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It's true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it--why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both. There are a good many "contemplatives" among our peasants. And Smerdyakov was probably one of them. And he was probably greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.

I will never be through with you, ever. I don’t know what I have to do to get you to realize that you’re my everything. I exist to love you, you’re my meaning of life, my reason to be, you were made for me and I was made to make you mine. What we have is too important to me to just throw away because of a picture and an incorrect quote. But you have got to have some faith in me Layla. I would never hurt you, you have to know that. I may get angry, lose my temper and storm away but I will always calm down and I will always come back. I could never leave you behind. I’d be lost without you.

Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will." ... You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said. ... "Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?

[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.

Where is the dog tag you found?” “What?” Shelton yipped. “We…lost it.” “Where?” “In the woods. After we ran.” “Where in the woods? Ran from what?” “Oh, uh…Tory dropped the tag when we ran from…whatever.” “From whatever?” Hi hammered. “Did you see men with guns or not?” “Um, no. I guess not.” “You guess?” “It was dark.” Shelton struggled. “I realize now that nobody was there.” “Then what did you hear?” “Uh, er…pops. Like sticks breaking?” Shelton’s responses were growing increasingly feeble. “How many? From which direction?” “Lots. Like, from everywhere.” Hi’s eyebrows shot up. “You heard ‘lots’ of ‘pops like sticks’ coming from everywhere? That’s your story?” “Wait, no, not everywhere. From the…left?

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers. One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird. But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.” The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage. She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.” However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage. One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds. If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body. Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. “Why have you come?” she asked Death. “So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied. “If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him ever more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.

No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with itshideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius-- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile. . . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. . . . Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully.When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days,listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals,of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism-- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.With your personality there is nothing you could not do.The world belongs to you for a season. . . . The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time.The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again.The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!

And as soon as you have renounced that aim of "surviving at any price" and gone where the calm and simple people go—then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected to you. And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the shoots of contradictory feelings. Once upon a time you were sharply intolerant. You were constantly in a rush. And you were constantly short of time. And now you have time with interest. You are surfeited with it, with its months and its years, behind you and ahead of you—and a beneficial calming fluid pours through your blood vessels—patience. You are acending... Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgements. You have come to realize your own weakness—and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. And wish to possess it yourself. The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending... With the year, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capability for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash over with gladness over good tidings, nor do they darken with grief. For you still have to verify whether that's how it is going to be. And you also have to work out—what is gladness and what is grief. And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost. Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens with suffering. And even if you haven't come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.

Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced when that, would just plunk his ass down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest of the way or sit here and smoke." It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with the critical apparatus of a worker bee, to keep scrabbling up that hill when he knows his destiny is dust. But that us what is required. Go on.

I've been thinking a lot about the word "everything." Whenever something horrible happens, you hear people say they "lost everything." They lost their house or their car or their stuff or whatever, and to them it feels like everything. But they have no idea what it's like to lose everything. I thought I knew, but now I realize even I haven't lost everything, because I still have that polka-dot swimsuit in my memory. I still have those ice cream nights and the scorpion that scared Marin and the Barking Bulldogs sweatshirt and the robins-egg-blue nail polish. Somehow having those things makes the other things matter less. I'm wondering if it's even possible to lose "everything" or if you just have to keep redefining what "everything" is.

There is an anchor for the soul at the cross of Christ, and it is saying to you today, ‘I love you.’ Yes, there is freedom but I have never lost control. It is saying to you, ‘I will take the worst and use it for eternal good.’ It is saying to you, ‘I am painting on a canvas bigger than you can see or understand,’ and it’s saying to you, ‘I understand.’ That cross is saying, ‘I understand.’ And when this stuff happens, we want to run away from God and be made at God and hate God. But when you look at the cross, you can’t because you realize and you can’t stop with the question we all want to ask, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ Or if you are a believer, ‘God why are you letting this happen to me?’ When you look at the cross, another thought emerges and the thought is, ‘Jesus, this happened to you. What’s happening to me, happened to you. You know about pain. You went through loss. You suffered death. You were mistreated. You were rejected. Everything in my life, good and bad, was all put on you.

He supposed he was only one of several million persons of his generation who had grown up and, somewhere around thirty, made the upsetting discovery that life wasn't going to pan out the way you'd always expected it would; and why this realization should have thrown him and not them—or not too many of them—was something he couldn't fathom. Life offered none of those prizes you'd been looking forward to since adolescence (he less than others, but looking forward to them all the same, if only out of curiosity). Adulthood came through with none of the pledges you'd been led somehow to believe in; the future still remained the future-illusion; a non-existent period of constantly-receding promise, hinting fulfillment, yet forever withholding the rewards. All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all. It was a mug's game and there ought to be a law. But there wasn't any law, there was no rhyme or reason; and with the sour-grapes attitude of “Why the hell should there be”—which is as near as you ever came to sophistication—you retired within yourself and compensated for the disappointment by drink, by subsisting on daydreams, by living in a private world of your own making (hell or heaven, what did it matter?), by accomplishing or becoming in fancy what you could never bring about in fact.

There is a light that glimmers along the darkening edge of an infinite horizon. In that light the heart finds what the heart seeks. In that light, Dumbo goes where his beloved Zombie goes. In that light, a boy named Ben Parish finds his baby sister. In that light, Marika saves a little girl called Teacup. In that light promises are kept, dreams realized, time redeemed. And Zombie’s voice speeding Dumbo toward the light “You made it private. You found me.” No darkness slamming down. No endless fall into lightlessness. All was light when I felt Dumbo’s soul break the horizon. Lost, found, and all was light.

I might be able to help, Daigian," Nynaeve said, leaning forward, laying her hand on the other woman's knee. "If I were to attempt a Healing, perhaps..." "No," the woman said curtly. "But—" "I doubt you could help." "Anything can be Healed," Nynaeve said stubbornly, "even if we don't know how yet. Anything save death." "And what would you do, dear?" Daigian asked. [...] "I could do something," Nynaeve said. "This pain you feel, it has to be an effect of the bond, and therefore something to do with the One Power. If the Power causes your pain, then the Power can take that pain away." "And why would I want that?" Daigian asked, in control once again. "Well... well, because it's pain. It hurts." "It should," Daigian said. "Eben is dead. Would you want to forget your pain if you lost that hulking giant of yours? Have your feelings for him cut away like some spoiled chunk of flesh in an otherwise good roast?" Nynaeve opened her mouth, but stopped. Would she? It wasn't that simple—her feelings for Lan were genuine, and not due to a bond. He was her husband, and she loved him. Daigian had been possessive of her Warder, but it had been the affection of an aunt for her favored nephew. It wasn't the same. But would Nynaeve want that pain taken away? She closed her mouth, suddenly realizing the honor in Daigian's words. "I see. I'm sorry.

Like you?” My face twisted in abhorrence, spitting the words like they were revolting. Her eyes widened. I shook my head, a dark chuckle on my lips. “You think I fucking like you? Are you kidding me here? I don’t like you. I love you. Even that’s an under-fucking-statement. I live for you. I breathe for you. I will die for you. It. Has. Always. Been. You. Ever since I saw your sorry ass for the first time on that threshold and you fucking poked me in the chest like I was a toy. We’ve been apart for ten years, Rose LeBlanc, and not even one day has passed without me thinking of you. And not just in passing. You know, the occasional she-could-have-been-a-g reat-fuck. I mean really taking my time to think about you. Wondering what you looked like. Where youwere. What you were doing. Who you were with. I stalked you on Facebook. And Twitter—which, by the way, you need to deactivate because you never once bothered to tweet—but you aren’t exactly a social media animal. I asked about you. Every time I was in town. And once I realized you were in New York with Millie…” “Rosie, I bought a new penthouse in TriBeca a few months before you moved into our building.” “Why are you telling me this?” She blinked away her tears, but fresh ones rolled down to replace them time. “Because I had to sell it and lost a shit-ton of money the moment I realized you were going to be my neighbor if I stayed in my current place. Real talk, Rosie, you are all I ever wanted. Even when you wanted me to be with your sister. She was a comforting candle. You were the dazzling sun. I’d lived in the dark—for your selfish ass. And if you think I’m going to settle for something , you’re dead wrong. I am taking everything . We will have kids, Rose LeBlanc. We will have a wedding. And we will have joy and vacations and days where we just fuck and days where we just fight and days where we just live. Because this is life, Baby LeBlanc, and I love the fuck out of you, so I’m going to give you the best one there is. Got it?

Magnus,” he said. “What on earth happened to James?” “What happened?” Magnus asked musingly. “Well, let me see. He stole a bicycle and rode it, not using his hands at any point, through Trafalgar Square. He attempted to climb Nelson’s Column and fight with Nelson. Then I lost him for a brief period of time, and by the time I caught up with him, he had wandered into Hyde Park, waded into the Serpentine, spread his arms wide, and was shouting, ‘Ducks, embrace me as your king!’” “Dear God,” said Will. “He must have been vilely drunk. Tessa, I can bear it no longer. He is taking awful risks with his life and rejecting all the principles I hold most dear. If he continues making an exhibition of himself throughout London, he will be called to Idris and kept there away from the mundanes. Does he not realize that?” Magnus shrugged. “He also made inappropriate amorous advances to a startled grandmotherly sort selling flowers, an Irish wolfhound, an innocent hat stand in a dwelling he broke into, and myself. I will add that I do not believe his admiration of my person, dazzling though I am, to be sincere. He told me I was a beautiful, sparkling lady. Then he abruptly collapsed, naturally in the path of an oncoming train from Dover, and I decided it was well past time to take him home and place him in the bosom of his family. If you had rather I put him in an orphanage, I fully understand.

One morning early, I couldn't sleep, so I walked down to the beach. And I saw you. For a minute- I didn't realize it was you. You were wearing this long scarf thing tied around your waist, lots of wild colors, and it blew around your legs. You had on a red bathing suit under it." "You..." She literally had to catch her breath. "You remember what I was wearing?" "Yes I do. And I remember your hair was longer than it is now, halfway down your back. All those mad curls flying. Bare feet. All that golden skin, wild colors, mad curls. My heart just stopped. I thought: That's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. And I wanted that woman, in a way I'd never wanted one before." He stopped, turned a little as she simply stared at him. "Then I saw it was you. You walked off, down the beach, the surf foaming up over your bare feet, your ankles, your calves. And I wanted you. I thought I'd lost my my mind.

But what I want to convey to you, Mr Okada, is this: I happened to lose my life at one particular moment in time, and I have gone on living these forty years or more with my life lost. As a person who finds himself in such a position, I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment – perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it is gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one’s life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twilight world, one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.

It’s possible you briefly lost that feeling of impending doom in 2008, after the likable, cool presidential candidate defeated the old man who slept through all his flight school classes. But that relief probably vanished in a wave of Wall Street bailouts and drone strikes and a brief Democratic congressional majority that didn’t even bother to pass the card check bill or push for true universal health care. Perhaps once you got a job, you realized that the pay—or, if you were really lucky, the benefits package—was vastly outweighed by what work took out of your soul, as you spent your days white-knuckling it from check to check, feeling like the same idiot failure you were before you had a job.

He felt something on his neck. Warmth. He hesitated, then turned weary eyes toward the sky. Sunlight bathed his face. He gaped; it seemed so long since he’d seen pure sunlight. It shone down through a large break in the clouds, comforting, like the warmth of an oven baking a loaf of Adrinne’s thick sourdough bread. Almen stood, raising a hand to shade his eyes. He took a deep, long breath, and smelled… apple blossoms? He spun with a start. The apple trees were flowering. That was plain ridiculous. He rubbed his eyes, but that didn’t dispel the image. They were blooming, all of them, white flowers breaking out between the leaves. [...] What was happening? Apple trees didn’t blossom twice. Was he going mad? Footsteps sounded softly on the path that ran past the orchard. Almen spun to find a tall young man walking down out of the foothills. He had deep red hair and he wore ragged clothing: a brown cloak with loose sleeves and a simple white linen shirt beneath. The trousers were finer, black with a delicate embroidery of gold at the cuff. “Ho, stranger,” Almen said, raising a hand, not knowing what else to say, not even sure if he’d seen what he thought he’d seen. “Did you… did you get lost up in the foothills?” The man stopped, turning sharply. He seemed surprised to find Almen there. With a start, Almen realized the man’s left arm ended in a stump. The stranger looked about, then breathed in deeply. “No. I’m not lost. Finally. It feels like a great long time since I’ve understood the path before me.

The essence of meditation practice in Dzogchen is encapsulated by these four points: ▪ When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn’t there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair’s breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness? Well, that is what Rigpa is! ▪ Yet it doesn’t stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn’t it? This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa. ▪ However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the “chain of delusion,” and is the root of samsara. ▪ If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated. Clearly this takes a lifetime of practice to understand and realize the full richness and majesty of these four profound yet simple points, and here I can only give you a taste of the vastness of what is meditation in Dzogchen. … Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arisings of the mind, and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other–and this is very important–than its “self-radiance,” the manifestation of its very energy. Say you find yourself in a deep state of stillness; often it does not last very long and a thought or a movement always arises, like a wave in the ocean.  Don’t reject the movement or particulary embrace the stillness, but continue the flow of your pure presence. The pervasive, peaceful state of your meditation is the Rigpa itself, and all risings are none other than this Rigpa’s self-radiance. This is the heart and the basis of Dzogchen practice. One way to imagine this is as if you were riding on the sun’s rays back to the sun: …. Of couse there are rough as well as gentle waves in the ocean; strong emotions come, like anger, desire, jealousy. The real practitioner recognizes them not as a disturbance or obstacle, but as a great opportunity. The fact that you react to arisings such as these with habitual tendencies of attachment and aversion is a sign not only that you are distracted, but also that you do not have the recognition and have lost the ground of Rigpa. To react to emotions in this way empowers them and binds us even tighter in the chains of delusion. The great secret of Dzogchen is to see right through them as soon as they arise, to what they really are: the vivid and electric manifestation of the energy of Rigpa itself. As you gradually learn to do this, even the most turbulent emotions fail to seize hold of you and dissolve, as wild waves rise and rear and sink back into the calm of the ocean. The practitioner discovers–and this is a revolutionary insight, whose subtlety and power cannot be overestimated–that not only do violent emotions not necessarily sweep you away and drag you back into the whirlpools of your own neuroses, they can actually be used to deepen, embolden, invigorate, and strengthen the Rigpa. The tempestuous energy becomes raw food of the awakened energy of Rigpa. The stronger and more flaming the emotion, the more Rigpa is strengthened.

I sat there listening to him talk and talk and I realised something really important. I thought I was in love with him for all those years but it turned out I was in love with the idea of William. The actual reality was a bit of an anti-climax. I thought, well, William would never shove the word WAG into pop songs to make me laugh and he wouldn’t bite the chocolate off chocolate-covered strawberries for me and he’d never, ever watch a film with Sandra Bullock in it, unless it was a Shakespeare adaptation and then he’d spend the entire film listing all the historical inaccuracies and he’d never go down on me for half an hour because he’d lost a game of Scrabble. Point of fact, I can’t imagine William doing anything that would mess up his hair, and he’s started popping the collars of his shirts and have I mentioned that he’s not you? He’s not you, Max, and that’s why I’m actually really pleased that he’s engaged and he’s moving to Warwickshire so I don’t have a constant reminder of what an idiot I’ve been.

I know the formulahe wants her she refuses him he charms her she holds her ground he does something dramatic like saves her from a fire or reinstates her family's lost fortune or dies she realizes she loved him all along wedding bells ring or pirate flags unfurl or she joins a convent happily ever afterbut I don't expect to live that way. I've learned that life is not like novels. Especially not like novels with rippling muscles on paperback covers. After reading a couple hundred of those booksyou know hypothetically speakingyou start to see that there's not that much difference between a romance and an epic fantasy. You've got your quest sometimes it involves a ring and a hero who will stop at nothing to do what he has to. The difference is usually the girl. And I'm not that girl. I'm not the girl who inspires men to commit acts of heroism. In real life those girls speak much more quietly and breathe a lot louder than I do. I'm not the girl who strikes men speechless with her beauty. Really really not. I don't even know how to flutter my eyelashes. But that's life. Not romance-novel life just real life.

We have to realize that we are a powerful force. If we work together, we can make a huge difference in the world, despite our race or religion. If we, as women, dare to come together we can help each other conquer our fears. We can help each other become wiser by teaching and learning from each other. We need to lift each other up more. Reach down to lend a helping hand. Reach up and tell your sisters of all races and religions, “I am here for you.” After all of the sacrifices we’ve made for others, surely, we can make sacrifices for each other. As much as we women have loved (and most definitely lost) due to heartbreak, being unappreciated, and working hard on a daily basis, why do we put each other down? Why do we use each other? What is the point in competing? Don’t we have enough going against us as it is? We should be able to come together and love one another. We should be able to help each other recover from our losses. That is what I call a powerful force.

Hot.” The last word, barely a whisper, lost itself in my hair as he pressed his lips to that spot just below my ear that can, apparently, flip the off switch in my brain. Before I realized it my hands were inside that jacket, stroking the hard planes of his chest and stomach. And then, as if moving without any prompting from me they reached down, undid his belt, pulled it loose, and…“Ahhh, that feels great,” I moaned.“I am completely grossed out over here!” Cassandra informed us.Vayl, who’d been peering down at me with an expression of utter disbelief, stared at Cassandra over the top of my head. “It is not what you think,” he assured her.“As if I’d do something that disgusting,” I said, pulling away from him, but keeping the belt, because the buckle relieved the itching so much better than fingernails. I continued using it to scratch the inflamed skin across my stomach as I sat down by Cassandra. “You are pathetic,” she told me. “I’d get all offended, but I’m pretty sure you’re right.

First, relax. ... And my second helpful hint is that you should not try to memorize anything you read in this book. ... My two words of advice are exemplified in what I call the Russian Novel Phenomenon. Every reader must have experienced that depressing moment about fifty pages into a Russian novel when we realize that we have lost track of all the characters, the variety of names by which they are known, their family relationships and relative ranks in the civil service. At this point we can give in to our anxiety, and start again to read more carefully, trying to memorize all the details on the offchance that some may prove to be important. If such a course is followed, the second reading is almost certain to be more incomprehensible than the first. The probable result: one Russian novel lost forever. But there is another alternative: to read faster, to push ahead, to make sense of what we can and to enjoy whatever we make sense of. And suddenly the book becomes readable, the story makes sense, and we find that we can remember all the important characters and events simply because we know what is important. Any re-reading we then have to do is bound to make sense, because at least we comprehend what is going on and what we are looking for.

When I got to school the next morning I had stepped only one foot in the quad when he spotted me and nearly tackled me to the ground. “Jamie!” he hollered, rushing across the lawn without caring the least bit about the scene he was creating. The next thing I knew, my feet were off the ground and I was squished so tightly in Ryan’s arms that I could barely breathe. “Okay, Ryan?” I coughed in a hushed tone. “This is exactly the kind of thing that can get you killed.” “I don’t care, I’m not letting go. Don’t ever disappear like that again!” he scolded, but his voice was more relieved than angry. “It’s been days! You had your mother worried sick!” “My mother?” I questioned sarcastically. Ryan laughed as he finally set me back on my feet. “Okay, fine, me too.” He still wouldn’t let go of me, though. He was gripping my arms while he looked at me with those eyes, and that smile… You know, being all Ryan-ish. And then, when I got lost in the moment, he totally took advantage of how whipped I was and he kissed me. The jerk. He just pulled my face to his right then and there, in the middle of a crowded quad full of students, where I could have accidentally unleashed an electrical storm at any moment. And okay, maybe I liked it, and maybe I even needed it, but still! You can’t just go kissing Jamie Baker whenever you want, even if you are Ryan Miller! “Ryan!” I yelled as soon as I was able to pull away from him—which admittedly took a minute. “I’m sorry.” Ryan laughed with this big dopey grin on his face and then kissed me some more. I had to push him away from me. “Don’t be sorry, just stop!” I realized I was screaming at him when I felt a hundred different pairs of eyes on me. I tried to ignore the audience that Ryan seemed oblivious to and dropped the audio a few decibels. “I wasn’t kidding when I said this has to stop. Look, I will be your friend. I want to be your friend. But that’s it. We can’t be anything more. It’ll never work.” Ryan watched me for a minute and then whispered, “Don’t do that.” I was shocked to hear the sudden emotion in his voice. “Don’t give up.” It was hopeless. “Fine!” I snapped. “I’ll be your stupid girlfriend!” Big shocker, me giving Ryan his way, I know. But let’s face it—it’s just what I do best. I had to at least act a little tough, though. “But!” I said in the harshest voice I was capable of. “You can’t ever touch me unless I say. No more tackling me, and especially no more surprise kissing.” He actually laughed at my request. “No promises.” Stupid, cocky boyfriend. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?” Ryan got this big cheesy smile on his face and said, “Crazy about you.” “Ugh,” I groaned. “Would you be serious for a minute? Why do you insist on putting your life in danger?” “Because I like you.” His stupid grin was infectious. I wanted to be angry, but how could I with him looking at me like that? “I’m not worth it, you know,” I said stubbornly. “I have issues. I’m unstable.” “You’re cute when you’re unstable,” Ryan said, “and I like your issues.” The stupid boy was straight-up giddy now. But he was so cute that I cracked a smile despite myself. “You really are crazy,” I muttered.

Adrian?" Her voice was small, nearly lost in the dripping of waterfrom the fountain. But the power it carried - and the effect it had on me - was monumental. I'd heard the expression "weak-kneed" before but had never lived it until now. My muscles didn't feel as though they could sustain me, and there was a great swelling in my chest, the result of a tangle of emotions I couldn't even begin to describe. Love. Joy. Relief. Disbelief. And mixed in with all of them were the emotions that I'd endured these last few months as well: despair, fear, rossow. It spread out from my heart, and I felt tears form in my eyes. It wasn't possible that one person could make you experience so many emotions at once, that one person could trigger a universe of feelings, simply with the sound of your name. I also knew then that they were wrong - all of them. My mom. My dad. Nina. Anyone who thought love could simply be built on shared goals alone had never, ever experienced anything like what I had with Sydney. I couldn't believe I'd almost lost this through my own ignorance. Until I looked into her eyes now, I didn't truly realize what a hollow life I'd been living. "Sydney..

Ms. Lane.”Barrons’ voice is deep, touched with that strange Old World accent and mildly pissed off. Jericho Barrons is often mildly pissed off. I think he crawled from the swamp that way, chafed either by some condition in it, out of it, or maybe just the general mass incompetence he encountered in both places. He’s the most controlled, capable man I’ve ever known. After all we’ve been through together, he still calls me Ms. Lane, with one exception: When I’m in his bed. Or on the floor, or some other place where I’ve temporarily lost my mind and become convinced I can’t breathe without him inside me this very instant. Then the things he calls me are varied and nobody’s business but mine. I reply: “Barrons,” without inflection. I’ve learned a few things in our time together. Distance is frequently the only intimacy he’ll tolerate. Suits me. I’ve got my own demons. Besides I don’t believe good relationships come from living inside each other’s pockets. I believe divorce comes from that. I admire the animal grace with which he enters the room and moves toward me. He prefers dark colors, the better to slide in and out of the night, or a room, unnoticed except for whatever he’s left behind that you may or may not discover for some time, like, say a tattoo on the back of one’s skull. “What are you doing?” “Reading,” I say nonchalantly, rubbing the tattoo on the back of my skull. I angle the volume so he can’t see the cover. If he sees what I’m reading, he’ll know I’m looking for something. If he realizes how bad it’s gotten, and what I’m thinking about doing, he’ll try to stop me. He circles behind me, looks over my shoulder at the thick vellum of the ancient manuscript. “In the first tongue?” “Is that what it is?” I feign innocence. He knows precisely which cells in my body are innocent and which are thoroughly corrupted. He’s responsible for most of the corrupted ones. One corner of his mouth ticks up and I see the glint of beast behind his eyes, a feral crimson backlight, bloodstaining the whites. It turns me on. Barrons makes me feel violently, electrically sexual and alive. I’d march into hell beside him. But I will not let him march into hell beside me. And there’s no doubt that’s where I’m going. I thought I was strong, a heroine. I thought I was the victor. The enemy got inside my head and tried to seduce me with lies. It’s easy to walk away from lies. Power is another thing. Temptation isn’t a sin that you triumph over once, completely and then you’re free. Temptation slips into bed with you each night and helps you say your prayers. It wakes you in the morning with a friendly cup of coffee, and knows exactly how you take it. He skirts the Chesterfield sofa and stands over me. “Looking for something, Ms. Lane?” I’m eye level with his belt but that’s not where my gaze gets stuck and suddenly my mouth is so dry I can hardly swallow and I know I’m going to want to. I’m Pri-ya for this man. I hate it. I love it. I can’t escape it. I reach for his belt buckle. The manuscript slides from my lap, forgotten. Along with everything else but this moment, this man. “I just found it,” I tell him.

You have an idea what the new country looks like. Still, you are very much at home, although not truly at peace, in the old country. You know the ways of the old country, it’s joys and pains, its happy and sad moments. You have spent most of your days there. Even though you know that you have not found there what your heart most desires, you remain quite attached to it. It has become part of your very bones. Now you have come to realize that you must leave it and enter the new country, where your Beloved dwells. You know that what helped and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by? You are being asked to trust that you will find what you need in the new country. That requires the death of what has become precious to you: influence, success, yes, even affection and praise. Trust is so hard, since you have nothing to fall back on. Still, trust is what is essential. The new country is where you are called to go, and the only way to go there is naked and vulnerable. It seems that you keep crossing and recrossing the border. For a while you experience a real joy in the new country. But then you feel afraid and start longing again for all you left behind, so you go back to the old country. To your dismay, you discover that the old country has lost its charm. Risk a few more steps into the new country, trusting that each time you enter it, you will feel more comfortable and be able to stay longer.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living - a set of values. This loneliness will blur and diminish, no doubt, when tomorrow I plunge again into classes, into the necessity of studying for exams. But now, that false purpose is lifted and I am spinning in a temporary vacuum. At home I rested and played, here, where I work, the routine is momentarily suspended and I am lost. There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been before. God was in the folds of his bathrobe, the ache of his knees. God saturated the hallways in the form of a pale electrical light. But now that his heart had become so shiftless and unreliable, now that he should be sensing the afterlife like a sweet scent drifting in from the garden, he had started to wonder if there was in fact no afterlife at all. Look at all these true believers who wanted only to live, look at himself, cling onto this life like a squirrel scrambling up the icy pitch of a roof. In suggesting that there may be nothing ahead of them, he in no way meant to diminish the future; instead, Father Sullivan hoped to elevate the present to a state of the divine. It seemed from this moment of repose that God may well have been life itself. God may have been the baseball games, the beautiful cigarette he smoked alone after checking to see that all the bats had been put back behind the closet door. God could have been the masses in which he had told people how best to prepare for the glorious life everlasting, the one they couldn't see as opposed to the one they were living at that exact moment in the pews of the church hall, washed over in stained glass light. How wrongheaded it seemed now to think that the thrill of heartbeat and breath were just a stepping stone to something greater. What could be greater than the armchair, the window, the snow? Life itself had been holy. We had been brought forth from nothing to see the face of God and in his life Father Sullivan had seen it miraculously for eighty-eight years. Why wouldn't it stand to reason that this had been the whole of existence and now he would retreat back to the nothingness he had come from in order to let someone else have their turn at the view. This was not the workings of disbelief. It was instead a final, joyful realization of all he had been given. It would be possible to overlook just about anything if you were trained to constantly strain forward to see the power and the glory that was waiting up ahead. What a shame it would have been to miss God while waiting for him.

Touching the copper of the ankh reminded me of another necklace, a necklace long since lost under the dust of time. That necklace had been simpler: only a string of beads etched with tiny ankhs. But my husband had brought it to me the morning of our wedding, sneaking up to our house just after dawn in a gesture uncharacteristically bold for him. I had chastised him for the indiscretion. "What are you doing? You're going to see me this afternoon... and then every day after that!" "I had to give you these before the wedding." He held up the string of beads. "They were my mother's. I want you to have them, to wear them today.” He leaned forward, placing the beads around my neck. As his fingers brushed my skin, I felt something warm and tingly run through my body. At the tender age of fifteen, I hadn't exactly understood such sensations, though I was eager to explore them. My wiser self today recognized them as the early stirrings of lust, and . . . well, there had been something else there too. Something else that I still didn't quite comprehend. An electric connection, a feeling that we were bound into something bigger than ourselves. That our being together was inevitable. "There," he'd said, once the beads were secure and my hair brushed back into place. "Perfect.” He said nothing else after that. He didn't need to. His eyes told me all I needed to know, and I shivered. Until Kyriakos, no man had ever given me a second glance. I was Marthanes' too-tall daughter after all, the one with the sharp tongue who didn't think before speaking. (Shape-shifting would eventually take care of one of those problems but not the other.) But Kyriakos had always listened to me and watched me like I was someone more, someone tempting and desirable, like the beautiful priestesses of Aphrodite who still carried on their rituals away from the Christian priests. I wanted him to touch me then, not realizing just how much until I caught his hand suddenly and unexpectedly. Taking it, I placed it around my waist and pulled him to me. His eyes widened in surprise, but he didn't pull back. We were almost the same height, making it easy for his mouth to seek mine out in a crushing kiss. I leaned against the warm stone wall behind me so that I was pressed between it and him. I could feel every part of his body against mine, but we still weren't close enough. Not nearly enough. Our kissing grew more ardent, as though our lips alone might close whatever aching distance lay between us. I moved his hand again, this time to push up my skirt along the side of one leg. His hand stroked the smooth flesh there and, without further urging, slid over to my inner thigh. I arched my lower body toward his, nearly writhing against him now, needing him to touch me everywhere. "Letha? Where are you at?” My sister's voice carried over the wind; she wasn't nearby but was close enough to be here soon. Kyriakos and I broke apart, both gasping, pulses racing. He was looking at me like he'd never seen me before. Heat burned in his gaze. "Have you ever been with anyone before?" he asked wonderingly. I shook my head. "How did you ... I never imagined you doing that...” "I learn fast.” He grinned and pressed my hand to his lips. "Tonight," he breathed. "Tonight we ...” "Tonight," I agreed. He backed away then, eyes still smoldering. "I love you. You are my life.” "I love you too." I smiled and watched him go.

It goes something like this: I am one person among 6.5 billion people on Earth at the moment. That's one person among 6,500,000,000 people. That'a lot of Wembley Stadiums full of people, and even more double-decker buses (apparently the standard British measurements for size). And we live on an Earth that is spinning at 67,000 miles an hour through space around a sun that is the centre of our solar system (and our solar system is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 530,000 mph). Just our solar system (which is a tiny speck within the entire universe) is very big indeed. If Earth was a peppercorn and Jupiter was a chestnut (the standard American measurements), you'd have to place them 100 metres apart to get a sense of the real distance between us. And this universe is only one of many. In fact, the chances are that there are many, many more populated Earths - just like ours - in other universes. And that's just space. Have a look at time, too. If you're in for a good run, you may spend 85 years on this Earth. Man has been around for 100,000 years, so you're going to spend just 0.00085 percent of man's history living on this Earth. And Man's stay on Earth has been very short in the context of the life of the Earth (which is 4.5 billion years old): if the Earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the Big Bang kicking it all off at midnight), humans didn't turn up until 11.59.58 p.m. That means we've only been around for the last two seconds. A lifetime is gone in a flash. There are relatively few people on this Earth that were here 100 years ago. Just as you'll be gone (relatively) soon. So, with just the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. As the Perspective Machine lifts up so far above the woods that we forget what the word means, we see just one moving light. It is beautiful. A small, gently glowing light. It is a firefly lost somewhere in the cosmos. And a firefly - on Earth - lives for just one night. It glows beautifully, then goes out. And up there so high in our Perspective Machine we realize that our lives are really just like that of the firefly. Except the air is full of 6.5 billion fireflies. They're glowing beautifully for one night. Then they are gone. So, Fuck It, you might as well REALLY glow.

one thing that I realized early on in thinking about this book, when I found, to my consternation, that I was writing a fantasy. I hadn't expected ever to write a fantasy, because I am not a great fantasy fan. But I realized that I could use the apparatus of fantasy to say things that I thought were true. Which was exactly what, I then realized, Milton had been doing with Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is not a story of people and some other people who've got wings. It's not one of those banal fantasies that just rely on somebody having magic and someone dropping a ring down a volcano. Paradise Lost is a great psychological novel that happens to be cast in the form of a fantasy, because the devils and the angels are, of course, embodiments of psychological states. The portrait of Satan, especially in the Temptation scene (I think it's in Book 9), is a magnificent piece of psychological storytelling. So it was possible to do, I realized, and with Milton as my encouragement, I launched into this book -- which I reluctantly accept has to be called a fantasy. Finding physical embodiments for things that were not themselves physical was one of the ways I approached what I wanted to say. But then, that's what we do with metaphor all the time. That's the way metaphor works. The way metaphor works is not the way allegory works. Allegory works because the author says, "This means so-and-so, that means such-and-such, and this can only be understood in such-and-such a way. If you don't understand it like this, the book won't work." It seems to me that some critics of mine, from the religious point of view, are treating my novel as if it were an allegory and they had the key to it. It is not an allegory, and they don't have the key to it, because there is no key apart from the sympathetic and open-minded understanding of the reader.

My Darling, It is late at night and though the words are coming hard to me, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s time that I finally answer your question. Of course I forgive you. I forgive you now, and I forgave you the moment I read your letter. In my heart, I had no other choice. Leaving you once was hard enough; to have done it a second time would have been impossible. I loved you too much to have let you go again. Though I’m still grieving over what might have been, I find myself thankful that you came into my life for even a short period of time. In the beginning, I’d assumed that we were somehow brought together to help you through your time of grief. Yet now, one year later, I’ve come to believe that it was the other way around. Ironically, I am in the same position you were, the first time we met. As I write, I am struggling with the ghost of someone I loved and lost. I now understand more fully the difficulties you were going through, and I realize how painful it must have been for you to move on. Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever. It would be easy for me to do that because loving someone else might diminish my memories of you. Yet, this is the paradox: Even though I miss you greatly, it’s because of you that I don’t dread the future. Because you were able to fall in love with me, you have given me hope, my darling. You taught me that it’s possible to move forward in life, no matter how terrible your grief. And in your own way, you’ve made me believe that true love cannot be denied. Right now, I don’t think I’m ready, but this is my choice. Do not blame yourself. Because of you, I am hopeful that there will come a day when my sadness is replaced by something beautiful. Because of you, I have the strength to go on. I don’t know if spirits do indeed roam the world, but even if they do, I will sense your presence everywhere. When I listen to the ocean, it will be your whispers; when I see a dazzling sunset, it will be your image in the sky. You are not gone forever, no matter who comes into my life. you are standing with God, alongside my soul, helping to guide me toward a future that I cannot predict. This is not a good-bye, my darling, this is a thank-you. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. I love you

My Dearest, Can you forgive me? In a world that I seldom understand, there are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore. You, my darling, are the wind that I did not anticipate, the wind that has gusted more strongly than I ever imagined possible. You are my destiny. I was wrong, so wrong, to ignore what was obvious, and I beg your forgiveness. Like a cautious traveler, I tried to protect myself from the wind and lost my soul instead. I was a fool to ignore my destiny, but even fools have feelings, and I’ve come to realize that you are the most important thing that I have in this world. I know I am not perfect. I’ve made more mistakes in the past few months than some make in a lifetime. I was wrong to deny what was obvious in my heart: that I can’t go on without you. You were right about everything. I tried to deny the things you were saying, even though I knew they were true. Like one who gazes only backward on a trip across the country, I ignored what lay ahead. I missed the beauty of a coming sunrise, the wonder of anticipation that makes life worthwhile. It was wrong of me to do that, a product of my confusion, and I wish I had come to understand that sooner. Now, though, with my gaze fixed toward the future, I see your face and hear your voice, certain that this is the path I must follow. It is my deepest wish that you give me one more chance. For the first few days after you left, I wanted to believe that I could go on as I always had. But I couldn’t. I knew in my heart that my life would never be the same again. I wanted you back, more than I imagined possible, yet whenever I conjured you up, I kept hearing your words in our last conversation. No matter how much I loved you, I knew it wasn’t going to be possible unless we—both of us—were sure I would devote myself fully to the path that lay ahead. I continued to be troubled by these thoughts until late last night when the answer finally came to me. Oh, I am sorry, so very sorry, that I ever hurt you. Maybe I’m too late now. I don’t know. I love you and always will. I am tired of being alone. I see children crying and laughing as they play in the sand, and I realize I want to have children with you. I am sick and sad without you. As I sit here in the kitchen, I am praying that you will let me come back to you, this time forever.

[The goal is] "liberation from the bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the atman and we call the soul, is distinct from the body and its senses, distinct from the mind and its intelligence; it is not part of the Absolute, for the Absolute, being infinite, can have no parts but the Absolute itself. It is uncreated; it has existed form eternity and when at least it has cast off the seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea, and in a shower has fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds its way into a stream, after that into a river, passing through mountain gorges and wide plains, winding this way and that, obstructed by rocks and fallen trees, till at least it reaches the boundless seas from which it rose." "But that poor little drop of water, when it has once more become one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality." Larry grinned. "You want to taste sugar, you don't want to become sugar. What is individuality but the expression of our egoism? Until the soul has shed the last trace of that it cannot become one with the Absolute." "You talk very familiarly of the Absolute, Larry, and it's an imposing word. What does it actually signify to you?" "Reality. You can't say what it is ; you can only say what it isn't. It's inexpressible. The Indians call it Brahman. It's not a person, it's not a thing, it's not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence and change; whole and part, finite and infinite. It is eternal because its completeness and perfection are unrelated to time. It is truth and freedom." "Golly," I said to myself, but to Larry: "But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they can turn in their distress for comfort and encouragement." "It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that's so, whom or what am I to worship—myself? Men are on different levels of spiritual development, and so the imagination of India has evolved the manifestations of the Absolute that are known as Brahma, Vishnu, Siva and by a hundred other names. The Absolute is in Isvara, the creator and ruler of the world, and it is in the humble fetish before which the peasant in his sun-baked field places the offering of a flower. The multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that the self is one with the supreme self.

Still, this moment belongs to the two of them, Mom and this handsome stranger. He reaches the passenger side door and stares down at her with steely violet eyes-down at my mother who never cries, down at my mother who’s now bawling like a spanked child-his face contorted in a rainbow of so many emotions, some that I can’t even name. Then Grom the Triton king sinks to his knees in front of her, and a single tear spills down his face. “Nalia,” he whispers. And then my mother slaps him. It’s not the kind of slap you get for talking back. It’s not the kind of punch she dealt Galen and Toraf in our kitchen. It’s the kind of slap a woman gives a man when he’s hurt her deeply. And Grom accepts it with grace. “I looked for you,” she shouts, even though he’s inches from her. Slowly, as if in a show of peace, he takes the hand that slapped him and sandwiches it between his own. He seems to revel in the feel of her touch. His face is pure tenderness, his voice like a massage to the nerves. “And I looked for you.” “Your pulse was gone,” she insists. By now she chokes back sobs between words. She’s fighting for control. I’ve never seen my mother fight for control. “As was yours.” I realize Grom knows what not to say, what not to do to provoke her. He is the complete opposite of her, or maybe just a completion of her. Her eyes focus on his wrist, and tears slip down her face, leaving faint trails of mascara on her cheeks. He smiles and slowly pulls his hand away. I think he’s going to show her the bracelet he’s wearing, but instead he rips it off his wrist and holds it out for her inspection. From where I’m standing it looks like a single black ball tied to some sort of string. By my mom’s expression, this black ball has meaning. So much meaning that I think she’s forgotten to breathe. “My pearl,” she whispers. “I thought I’d lost it.” He encloses it in her hand. “This isn’t your pearl, love. That one was lost in the explosion with you. For almost an entire season, I scoured the oyster beds, looking for another one that would do. I don’t know why, but I thought maybe if I found another perfect pearl, I would somehow find you, too. When I found this though, it didn’t bring me the peace I’d hoped for. But I couldn’t bring myself to discard it. I’ve worn it on my wrist ever since.” This is all it takes for my mom to throw herself into his arms, bringing Rachel partially with her. Even so, it’s probably the most moving moment I’ve ever encountered in my eighteen years. Or at least it would be, if my mom weren’t clinging to a man who is not my dad.

Tsunami spotted Snail and Herring among the guards. Their eyes darted anxiously from side to side, as if they were wondering how they were still alive. Because Mother wants to make a spectacle of them, Tsunami guessed. Coral was probably waiting for the right moment to punish them in public, the way she’d punished Tortoise. Well, two can play the spectacle game, Your Majesty. “MOTHER!” Tsunami declared dramatically as the waitstaff set bowls of soup in front of each dragon. Beside her, Whirlpool jumped and nearly tipped his bowl onto himself. Even Queen Coral looked startled. “I have something DREADFULLY SHOCKING to tell you!” Tsunami announced. She wanted this to be loud, so every dragon could witness it. “Oh?” said Coral. “Could we discuss it after breakfast? In a civilized fashion?” “NO,” Tsunami said, louder than before. “This is TOO SHOCKING.” Even SeaWings not invited to the feast were starting to peer out of their caves and poke their heads out of the lake to hear what was going on. “Well, perhaps —” Coral started. “WOULD YOU BELIEVE,” Tsunami said, “that my friends — the DRAGONETS OF DESTINY, remember — were CHAINED UP? And STARVED? In YOUR CAVES? By YOUR DRAGONS?” “What?” Coral said, flapping her wings. She looked thoroughly alarmed, but Tsunami couldn’t tell whether that was because the news actually surprised her or because she was being confronted openly with what she’d done. “I KNOW!” Tsunami practically bellowed. “It’s UNBELIEVABLE. I’m sure you didn’t know anything about it, of course.” “Of course,” Coral said in a hurry. “I would never treat any dragonets that way! Especially my dearest daughter’s dearest friends. Who are part of the prophecy and everything.” “And I’m sure you’ll want to punish the dragons who disobeyed you by treating my friends so terribly,” Tsunami said. “Right? Like, for instance, the one who lied to you about keeping them well fed?” She shot a glare at Lagoon, who froze with a sea snail halfway to her mouth, suddenly realizing what was going on. “Absolutely,” said the queen. “Guards! Throw Lagoon in one of the underwater dungeons!” “But —” Lagoon said. “But I was only —” “Next time you’ll obey my orders,” said the queen. A stripe quickly flashed under her wings, but Tsunami spotted it, and it was one Riptide had taught her. Silence. Oh, Mother, Tsunami thought sadly. “Can’t I even —” Lagoon said, reaching wistfully for her cauldron of soup as the guards pulled her away. “No breakfast for you,” the queen ordered. “Think about how that feels as you sit in my dungeon.” Tsunami was fairly sure Lagoon wouldn’t actually suffer very much. Queen Coral would have her back at Council meetings before long. But Tsunami wasn’t done. “And

I don't know for sure what ever became of Hatsumomo. A few years after the war, I heard she was making a living as a prostitute in the Miyagawa-cho district. She couldn't have been there long, because on the night I heard it, a man at the same party swore that if Hatsumomo was a prostitute, he would find her and give her some business of his own. He did go looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Over the years, she probably succeeded in drinking herself to death. She certainly wouldn't have been the first geisha to do it. In just the way that a man can grow accustomed to a bad leg, we'd all grown accustomed to having Hatsumomo in our okiya. I don't think we quite understood all the ways her presence had afflicted us until long after she'd left, when things that we hadn't realized were ailing slowly began to heal. Even when Hatsumomo had been doing nothing more than sleeping in her room, the maids had known she was there, and that during the course of the day she would abuse them. They'd lived with the kind of tension you feel if you walk across a frozen pond whose ice might break at any moment. And as for Pumpkin, I think she'd grown to be dependent on her older sister and felt strangely lost without her. I'd already become the okiya's principal asset, but even I took some time to weed out all the peculiar habits that had taken root because of Hatsumomo. Every time a man looked at me strangely, I found myself wondering if he'd heard something unkind about me from her, even long after she was gone. Whenever I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the okiya, I still kept my eyes lowered for fear that Hatsumomo would be waiting there on the landing, eager for someone to abuse. I can't tell you how many times I reached that last step and looked up suddenly with the realization that there was no Hatsumomo, and there never would be again. I knew she was gone, and yet the very emptiness of the hall seemed to suggest something of her presence. Even now, as an older woman, I sometimes lift the brocade cover on the mirror of my makeup stand, and have the briefest flicker of a thought that I may find her there in the glass, smirking at me.

I’ve done you a disservice,” he said at last. “It’s only fair to let you know, but you won’t have a normal life span.” I bit my lip. “Have you come to take my soul, then?” “I told you that’s not my jurisdiction. But you’re not going to die soon. In fact, you won’t die for a long time, far longer than I initially thought, I’m afraid. Nor will you age normally.” “Because I took your qi?” He inclined his head. “I should have stopped you sooner.” I thought of the empty years that stretched ahead of me, years of solitude long after everyone I loved had died. Though I might have children or grandchildren. But perhaps they might comment on my strange youthfulness and shun me as unnatural. Whisper of sorcery, like those Javanese women who inserted gold needles in their faces and ate children. In the Chinese tradition, nothing was better than dying old and full of years, a treasure in the bosom of one’s family. To outlive descendants and endure a long span of widowhood could hardly be construed as lucky. Tears filled my eyes, and for some reason this seemed to agitate Er Lang, for he turned away. In profile, he was even more handsome, if that was possible, though I was quite sure he was aware of it. “It isn’t necessarily a good thing, but you’ll see all of the next century, and I think it will be an interesting one.” “That’s what Tian Bai said,” I said bitterly. “How long will I outlive him?” “Long enough,” he said. Then more gently, “You may have a happy marriage, though.” “I wasn’t thinking about him,” I said. “I was thinking about my mother. By the time I die, she’ll have long since gone on to the courts for reincarnation. I shall never see her again.” I burst into sobs, realizing how much I’d clung to that hope, despite the fact that it might be better for my mother to leave the Plains of the Dead. But then we would never meet in this lifetime. Her memories would be erased and her spirit lost to me in this form. “Don’t cry.” I felt his arms around me, and I buried my face in his chest. The rain began to fall again, so dense it was like a curtain around us. Yet I did not get wet. “Listen,” he said. “When everyone around you has died and it becomes too hard to go on pretending, I shall come for you.” “Do you mean that?” A strange happiness was beginning to grow, twining and tightening around my heart. “I’ve never lied to you.” “Can’t I go with you now?” He shook his head. “Aren’t you getting married? Besides, I’ve always preferred older women. In about fifty years’ time, you should be just right.” I glared at him. “What if I’d rather not wait?” He narrowed his eyes. “Do you mean that you don’t want to marry Tian Bai?” I dropped my gaze. “If you go with me, it won’t be easy for you,” he said warningly. “It will bring you closer to the spirit world and you won’t be able to lead a normal life. My work is incognito, so I can’t keep you in style. It will be a little house in some strange town. I shan’t be available most of the time, and you’d have to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.” I listened with increasing bewilderment. “Are you asking me to be your mistress or an indentured servant?” His mouth twitched. “I don’t keep mistresses; it’s far too much trouble. I’m offering to marry you, although I might regret it. And if you think the Lim family disapproved of your marriage, wait until you meet mine.” I tightened my arms around him. “Speechless at last,” Er Lang said. “Think about your options. Frankly, if I were a woman, I’d take the first one. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of family.” “But what would you do for fifty years?” He was about to speak when I heard a faint call, and through the heavy downpour, saw Yan Hong’s blurred figure emerge between the trees, Tian Bai running beside her. “Give me your answer in a fortnight,” said Er Lang. Then he was gone.