Rebuilt Myself Quotes

I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s burnt down?” “Yes.” “Twice.” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burnt down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

But I would be lying if I didn’t say it was also a storm. And some storms leave a path of destruction in their wake. Some things are demolished or lost, while others must be rebuilt, repaved, and reconstructed. But, through it all, I kept reminding myself that all storms eventually pass, and sometimes things can change and improve

Was this what it was to love someone? To have that wall of detachment crumble and be rebuilt into a bridge? I thought so. I swore it to myself because after those hours, we were so real together no one had to ask what was going on. Caden and I were an incurable condition. Dispassion had a place in our lives, but not with each other.

In fancy I took the simple decision of going on, this time on the mere trail to which our roads had now given way. I played with the idea...To be alone, without possessions, without renown, with none of the advantages of our own culture, to expose oneself among new men and among fresh hazards...Needless to say it was only a dream, and the briefest dream of all. This liberty that I was inventing ceased to exist upon closer view; I should quickly have rebuilt for myself everything that I renounced. Furthermore, wherever I went I should only have been a Roman away from Rome. A kind of umbilical cord attached me to the city. Perhaps at that time, in my rank of tribune, I felt still more closely bound to the empire than later as emperor, for the same reason that the thumb joint is less free than the brain. Nevertheless I did have that outlandish dream, at which our ancestors, soberly confined within their Latian fields, would have shuddered; to have harbored the thought, even for a moment, makes me forever different from them.

I was used to meeting politicians. I was not nervous. After the PM presented me with the award and check, I presented him with a long list of demands. I told him that we wanted our schools rebuilt and a girls’ university in Swat. I knew he would not take my demands seriously, so I didn’t push very hard. I thought, One day I will be a politician and do these things myself.

I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush red corridors of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I needed to see the inside of suite 228, which was otherwise referred to in the voluminous hotel literature as "the Graham Greene Suite." Greene, whom I had been mildly fixated on for some time, had stayed there during the fifties. I was staying next door in suite 226, and after several days of wondering how I was going to get into his room, I noticed the maid's cart outside. When she finally ducked out to refill her stash of aloe shampoo and little almond soaps, I slipped through the half-opened door. Inside was a bare mahogany desk, a brass lamp, a king-size bed with a modern, striped duvet, and several spindly French sofas, also striped. I couldn't help feeling vastly let down. The setting was devoid of both Greene's seediness - he later regretted popularising the word "seedy" - and his elegance, which should not, of course, have come as a surprise. The Metropole was gutted after the war and rebuilt. And even if it hadn't been, I knew from experience that this sort of literary pilgrimage is always anticlimactic: the writer is dead and what remains of him is in his books.

Whatever was going on within me, said Austerlitz, the panic I felt on facing the start of any sentence that must be written, not knowing how I could begin it or indeed any other sentence, soon extended to what is in itself the simpler business of reading, until if I attempted to read a whole page I inevitably fell into a state of the greatest confusion. If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past—perhaps I could understand that least of all. All I could think was that such a sentence only appears to mean something, but in truth is at best a makeshift expedient, a kind of unhealthy growth issuing from our ignorance, something which we use, in the same way as many sea plants and animals use their tentacles, to grope blindly through the darkness enveloping us.

I have loved you with an everlasting love…I will build you up again, and you…will be rebuilt. JEREMIAH 31:3-4 Father, I come before You feeling broken in a thousand pieces. I’ve been slowly wandering away from You and I can’t do this anymore. I’ve heard You call me, but I haven’t wanted to listen. I’ve felt You whisper Truth, but I wanted You to be wrong. You knew how my decisions would end, yet I didn’t want to be stopped. So now, here I am—at the end of myself. I need You. I refuse to take another step without You. I give You everything. Your Word says that after my suffering You will restore me, make me strong, firm, and steadfast (1 Peter 5:10). You have promised to rebuild me, so Father, pour the foundation and lay the structures of my heart. When You created me, You knew the woman that You wanted me to be. Reclaim what I’ve lost and breathe Your life into my soul. Thank You, God, that as You restore me, You give me so much more than I could ever ask for or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). Lord, rebuild me. In Jesus’ name I pray.

But a war isn’t won by forgetting Instead I’ll hit back hard take back the air you stole from my lungs And remind myself homes are rebuilt over ashes

Marathas, Jats and Gujars who robbed and killed any man they could lay their hands on and raped any woman who fell into their clutches. It took me five days to reach Agra. By then Nadir’s horde was busy pillaging and looting Delhi. I said to myself: ‘No matter a city can be rebuilt and repopulated but no power on earth can put together a heart that has been shattered.’ Agra was the city of my heart’s ruination. I