Schneider Quotes

And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

If you like nerds, raise your hand. If you don't, raise your standards.

Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.

She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself.

Being temporary doesn't make something matter any less, because the point isn't for how long, the point is that it happened.

You have this maddening little smile sometimes, like you've just thought of something incredibly witty but are afraid to say it in case no one gets the joke.

There's a word for it," she told me, "in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it." "That's a terrible word," I teased. "It's like an excuse for holding onto the past." "Well, I think it's beautiful. A word for remembering small moments destined to be lost.

Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends'.

That's all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats against you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going.

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

The funny thing about gold is how quickly it can tarnish.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you choose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many.

History is filled with fictional people.

I pictured her tragically; it never once ocurred to me to picture her as the tragedy.

You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed.

We mourn the future because it's easier than admitting that we're miserable in the present.

There's difference between being dead and dying. We're all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it.

Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, that the people buying milk in their pajamas or picking their noses at stoplights could be only moments away from disaster. That everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment when it will become extraordinary - a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen.

Still here, Faulkner?" Luke sneered. "Still doing that terrible impression of Draco Malfoy?" I asked.

Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things. - Hannah Schneider

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

You're better off without me. And I don't want to be around when you realize it.

I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

It was about being able to dance like Cassidy did, as though no one was watching, as though the moment was infinite enough without needing to document its existence.

And the thing about trying to cheat death is that, in the end, you still lose.

No matter how screwed up your life is today, today is just a collection of moments that stop and start whenever you want them to. And nothing upsetting matters when you know that tomorrow is gonna be better than yesterday

You can always tell when it's Friday. There's an excitement specific to Fridays, coupled with relief that another week has passed

I'm not permitted to explain the rules of the game. Nor to acknowledge whether or not we're playing one.

Ezra, the girl you're chasing after doesn't exist. I'm not some bohemian adventurer who takes you on treasure hunts and sends you secret messages. I'm this sad, lonely mess who studies too much and pushes people away and hides in her haunted house.

Why do they even call it that, "saving yourself"? Like we need to be rescued from sex? It's not like virgins spend their whole lives engaged in the sacred ceremony of "being saved" from intercourse.

It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.

Outwardly mocking, but never quite to the point if not wanting to participate.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary--made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to. "I think I'll stick with reality," I said, handing Cassidy back her phone. She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. "I'd think you of all people would want to escape." "Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.

No one went looking for adventure; they chased it away.

You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we're the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I'd rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me.

She didn't add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine.

Art is pain. And so is life.

The world tends toward chaos, you know," Cassidy said. You could too. Just write down a made up name, or even a fictional character. And the next person who finds this geocache, it's as though things really hapened that way. You have to at least allow for the possibility of it.

Because the thing about miracles is that they’re not answers, no matter how much we want them to be.

It’s like . . . I’m paranoid about people borrowing my laptop because I’m convinced they’ll find some secret document on there that would make the whole world think I’m a terrible person—something I don’t even remember writing. And it doesn’t matter that there’s no document like that. I’m still terrified, you know?

I can't say I forgive her for refusing to indulge the perhapsness of what we might have been, but I understand why she chose to do it, and she never asked for my forgiveness.

And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself.

I still think that everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst - the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere - it's what comes after that determines the result.

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and it’s these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be. . . . I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Sorry,' I apologized, realizing she was the sort of girl who got upset when someone used an unfamiliar word, rather than learning what it meant.

But we had plenty of time for youthful indecision, both apart and together, for limping into the future past the unforgettable ash heaps of our histories.

We're living tragedies, just passing time 'til our funerals.

..pain can't be taken away. It has to leave on its own. And I wasn't sure mine was the type of pain that wanted to go away.

I read once that we’re all just dead stars looking back up to the sky, because everything we’re made of, even the hemoglobin in our blood, comes from the moment before a star dies.

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre

And that was when I saw what Cassidy had done to herself: the gold and red ribbing on her sweater-vest, the matching stripes on her tie, the gray uniform skirt, and the navy blazer draped over her arm... "Is that a Gryffindor tie?" I asked. "And an official Harry Potter Merchandise sweater-vest," she confirmed smugly.

I learned without her saying a word that there are truly many ways to pray, and lighting a candle is one of them.

Maybe I’d already guessed that the physics of us didn’t defy any laws of gravity, and with her, there was always an equal and opposite reaction.

I don't know which is worse," Cassidy mused, "when people laugh at things that aren't funny, or when they don't laugh at things that are.

I mean, don't you want to be like everyone else?" "Not particularly.

Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many.

One thing I've noticed is that the only places people insist you relax are the least relaxing places on the planet.

You're the one who has to live with your choice. Everyone else will get over it, move on, no matter what you decide. But you never will.

But at the last minute, I turned left, because I never had before, and because I had time to go down a different road.

Schneider has made a career of telling the public that the climate is going to change drastically, and indeed every spring and fall he's been right.

...history is filled with fictional people. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I'd never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all.

It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they're supposed to be. I've been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window?

It's strange how can lose things that are still right there. How a barrier can go up at any moment, trapping you on the other side, keeping you from what you want. How the things that hurt the most are things we once had.

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary--made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.

There is nothing sadder in this world than the waste of human potential. The purpose of evolution is to raise us out of the mud, not have us grovelling in it

You must not quote to me what I once said. I am wiser now.

Not at all, I just don't understand how the Arch Alchemist became mortal all of a sudden." "Because he split his soul into seven pieces and hid them all over Justice City," Toby retorted. "You turned our comic book into a Harry Potter rip-off?" I spluttered.

No matter how screwed up life is today, today is just a collection of moments that stop and start where you want them to. And nothing upsetting matters when you know tomorrow's gonna be better than yesterday

I have a theory that life is gathering the raw materials, and when we die, we get to make patterns out of our lives and relive them in whatever order we want. That way I can spend forever repeating the days when I was really happy, and never have to experience any of the sad days. So that's how you live a really great life. You make sure you have enough good days that you want to go back to.

But I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

Sillage, I thought. The lingering impression of a kiss having ended.

Be led by your joy.

Austin believes that winning or losing in binary is meaningless when there's a high score to beat.

It had hurt to accept what was wrong with me, but it hurt even more to have hope.

In AP Bio, I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day, I'll have a body full of cells that were never sick. But it also means that parts of me that knew and loved Sadie will disappear. I'll still remember loving her, but it'll be a different me who loved her. And maybe this is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency. The percentage of my skin that touched hers will lessen until one day my lips won't be the same lips that kissed hers, and all I'll have are the memories. Memories of cottages in the woods, arranged in a half-moon. Of the tall metal tray return in the dining hall. Of the study tables in the library. The rock where we kissed. The sunken boat in Latham's lake, Sadie, snapping a photograph, laughing the lunch line, lying next to me at the movie night in her green dress, her voice on the phone, her apple-flavored lips on mine. And it's so unfair. All of it.

Now can you rate your pain for me on a scale of one to ten?" But I couldn't. It seemed so wrong to me then that there were only ten options, only ten types of pain. Because I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of types of pain in this world, maybe even thousands. And none of these are numbers on the same scale. They all hurt differently, and amounts have nothing to do with it. They all hurt too much, and not enough.

She tasted like buried treasure and swing swets and coffee. She tasted the way fireworks felt, like something you could get close to but never really have just for yourself.

You forgot how to be awesome because you were too busy being cool

What a pity. How the stars and seas and rivers in their fragile lace of fog go on without us morning after morning, year after year. And we disappear.

Fine! You guys can all be beautiful snowflakes! I'm gonna go over here and be an awkward snowflake!

Sometimes a day last an hour, and sometimes it lasts a year

How many beers do y'all think it takes before one internationally scientist turns to another and says, 'Dude, bet you twenty bucks I can levitate a frog with a magnet?' ' Sam drawled.

So," I said as Cassidy and I headed toward Mr. Moreno's room, "I didn't see any secret messages last night." "I didn't want to be predictable," Cassidy retorted. "But at least now I know you're paying attention.

We move through each other’s lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed.

Love is when two people who care for each other get confused

Love means listening.

We’re like a positively charged molecule, the rate we’re attracting tragedy.

But second chances aren't forever Even miracles have an expiration date.

Steinbeck wrote about the tide pools and how profoundly they illustrate the interconnectedness of all things, folded together in an ever-expanding universe that's bound by the elastic string of time. He said that one should look from the tide pool to the stars, and then back again in wonder.

I'm so sorry. I always felt like there was something off about me, and now I know. I'm broken." It wrecked me all over again to hear her say that. "You're not broken." "Then how come I can't be fixed?" she asked, shaking as she held back tears. "If I'm not broken, how come no one can fix me?

Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.

There. You see? You’re just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other’s lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we’re the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I’d rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me.

Omigod, I'm so bored I could shoot myself in the head with a knife.

I don’t see the point in caffeine without coffee. Or coffee without caffeine, for that matter,” I informed him.

The world tends toward chaos, you know,” Cassidy said. “I’m just helping it along.

We'd been so good together once, and then we'd rotted, like some corpse with a delayed burial.

We all reach for whatever we think is going to dull the pain, and sometimes we don't even want whatever it is, we just want to not be miserable, you know?

The pause in conversation when you're about to introduce someone but you've forgotten their name. There's a word for it. In Scotland, it's called a tartle.

It wasn't the life I'd wanted, but it was the life I had, and I was finally starting to accept that.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?

One thing I've realized about new places is that they're like jeans. Sure, they might fit in, but they're not comfortable. They need time to be broken in

No one wants to get hurt." " Well, maybe not, but sometime's it's worth it.

Start as you mean to go on.

I wondered what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

For the girl who secretly hoped she'd get a Hogwarts letter - For the girl who makes wishes on every 11:11 - For the girl who ran out of space on her bookshelves and bought this book anyway

There's a word for it," she told me, "in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

I didn’t want to kiss you good-bye—that was the trouble— I wanted to kiss you good night— and there’s a lot of difference. —ERNEST HEMINGWAY Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

So basically you're just a fucking train wreck?" she joked. "I prefer conflicted," I corrected.

Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners.

I didn't realise you'd ridden here on your high horse

as far as I know, scientists have yet to discover the proper reaction to “I’m sorry.

I love that there's such a rivalry. It's like, leaf water versus bean water, ya know?

Life is tough. If you don’t laugh it’s tougher.

Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.

It's awful, ins't it, how I remember crap like that? Tiny, insignificant details in the midst of a massive disaster.

We're taking the road beyond the road less traveled, and being on time will make all difference.

We're two sides of the same tragic coin. It's like we were tied together before we even met.

But how will we learn from our mistakes if we don't make any?

The dead never listen when you want to tell them anything.

Usually spending any amount of time with someone was a forcible reminder of how much I'd rather be alone.

I just hadn't wanted to admit it, because admitting it meant acknowledging the possibility that the odds might be in my favor. And that possibility was terrifying.

I was focusing on the now. But that didn't mean I couldn't still wonder about what came after.

Eine jede Hoffnung ist ohne Sinn. Kein Mensch verfalle auf die Idee, auf die Erfüllung seiner Träume zu sinnen. Vielmehr soll er den Irrsinn des Hoffens begreifen. Hat er ihn begriffen, darf er hoffen. Wenn er dann noch träumen kann, hat sein Leben Sinn.

Because that's all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going. It took a lot of things to make me realize that. To make me see the path, as the destination.

The truth of it was, I'd been running the wrong experiment my whole life, and while Cassidy was the first person to realize, she didn't add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine. Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

God exacted interest like a loanshark, you paid and kept paying and still He broke all yr bones, one Yom Kippur, at the beginning of her 30th year, God had written her name once again in the book of loss, Bertha Schneider, let her lose everything, God had written in that pedestrian prose of His. rub it in, pile it on, and let her eat cake, the kind wrapped in plastic, God had scratched in the margin.

Because the truth is always hard. Because being queer is hard, and coming out is hard, and it never stops being hard. The world keeps shoving into you. But you stand tall anyway. You take up space anyway.

Our greatest challenge today...is to couple conviction with doubt. By conviction, I mean some pragmatically developed faith, trust, or centeredness; and by doubt I mean openness to the ongoing changeability, mystery, and fallibility of the conviction.

They say your skin is the largest organ in your body, but I'd never really appreciated that before, the way his fingertips slowly tracing the curve of my jaw could travel down the entire length of my body, covering me in goose bumps. The way he could make me feel flushed with something that wasn't fever.

I suppose she didn't think anyone was looking and had let her guard down, the way you did in an empty room. The way I did when I closed the blinds and stared up at the ceiling fan above my bed, equally fascinated and horrified by the thoughts racing through my brain.

Alles ist gut.

when religion has no place in politics, then politics has no measure and no orientation. Then politics and the State become a kind of god.

How will you feel when you're being swallowed up?

I finally got up around noon, after having decided that, as far as monogamous relationships go, I could probably do worse than marrying my bed.

I had a massive bed at home, and I loved her dearly. She was my queen, and I was her loyal subject.

But we’re the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us.

Both writing and praying are acts of deep vulnerability.

The perfect soundtrack for my personal hell.

with the rise of Freemasonry, Gnostic thinking entered in, and this is ultimately Satanic thinking, where man puts himself in the place of the Creator.

It was like Latham: sometimes the point wasn't being the best, because it didn't mean you had the best life, or the best friends, or the best time.

Being temporary doesn’t make something matter any less, because the point isn’t for how long, the point is that it happened.

The life you pan isn't the life that happens again

Well, fresh air's supposedly good for us,' I said. 'Breathing: The miracle cure everyone's been looking for.

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing of everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her, because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I’d learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn’t exactly overlap with my friends’.

You're funny.' Phoebe passed me the last chocolate cupcake. 'And I always thought your friends were laughing over their own farts.' 'Ninety percent of Eastwood's male population laughs over their own farts. Present company excluded, naturally.

Here's a secret," I said. "There's a difference between being dead and dying. We're all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us die for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it.

It was the answer to the wrong mystery--the mystery I didn't ever want to solve. And so we sat there in the sickening sillage of the truth, neither of us angry, or upset, just muddling through this shared sorrow, this collective pity. And as much as I wanted to sound my tragic wail over the rooftops, and let go of the day, and crawl back toward that safe harbor and give in to the dying of the light, and to do all of those unheroically injured things that people never write poems about, I didn't.

It was about being able to dance like Cassidy did, as though no one was watching, as though the moment was infinite enough without needing to document its existence. And so I closed my eyes and tried.

Nothing lasts, even this awesome floaty feeling. We all reach for whatever we think is going to dull the pain, and sometimes we don't even want whatever it is, we just want to not be miserable, you know?

I reached for the switch on my desk lamp and flashed HELLO. The lights switched off in Cassidy's bedroom, and her flashlight flicked on. SORRY. "She's sorry," I told Cooper, because he didn't understand Morse code. He lifted his head as if to say But you already knew that, old sport. Her flashlight flickered again. FORGIVE ME. This time, I didn't hesitate. ALWAYS, I replied.

I knew what is was like to have people stare at you with pity. For everyone's gaze to follow you through the hallways as though you were marked by tragedy and no longer belonged. And I could understand why she hadn't wanted that.

But I know now that isn’t true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn’t exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary—made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn’t whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it’s whether or not you want to.

European society is no longer a civilization. It has no civilization, because they have divorced themselves from natural law and from divine revelation. The current European so-called civilization represents ugliness, chaos, and cruelty.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be underconstant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway." "But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?"... "That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners.

Waiting for an angel. Someone to ameliorate. Lift me over difficulties. I stop looking. My angel is me.

Wie so oft vermochte ein geringfügiger Anlaß die Bewohner in derartige Hysterie zu versetzen, daß sie über Nacht entweder zu Heiligen oder zu Mördern werden konnten.

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye.

Whatever you do, do it with LOVE...

She tasted like buried treasure and swing sets and coffee.

If I am an artist, I have a vocation. As one drawn to a lover or called to a religious mission, I go to my work—my writing—because it is essential to my happiness.

So where are we going?" "Where we have no business being, other than the business of mischief and deception.

There was no half-assing a descent into hell.

Míralos qué monos. Él le hace daño a ella, pero también la quiere amar.

And being healthy, being okay, wouldn't feel normal at all. It would feel incredible.

It' so funny how small moments can ruin everything.

The process of leniency involves accepting the reality of the current situation and finding a satisfying meaning therein, as opposed to misconstruing or denying the facts of the situation.

Appreciation involves being alert to the positive aspects of the current situation and feeling thankful for what one has and for one's circumstances. This requires not only a positive perspective in the present but also conscious awareness of features in the surround. The latter, in fact, is something that may be surprisingly rare. Especially when we are engaging in routine activities, we often do so mindlessly (Langer, 1997) or as though we were on automatic pilot (Cialdini, 1993). If we learn to bring our attention to the current state, we can choose to focus on positive aspects of the situation and to remind ourselves of the potential sources of good feelings that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Thinking about it like that made it more bearable, that we go back to God when we've had our turn, that some of us roll the dice less than we'd like, but that we're the ones who are rolling them.

I'm going to be okay," Sadie promised as I left. "I know you are," I said, except they were just empty hospital words, the kind that you wish were true becuase the alternative is too painful to bear.

This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest threat and greatest cause of anxiety for an American near the end of the twentieth century is not castration but ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one’s group. Many a contemporary man castrates himself or permits himself to be castrated because of fear of being exiled if he doesn’t. He renounces his power and conforms under the great threat and peril of ostracism. — Rollo May, “The Tragedy of Truth About Oneself” (The Psycology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective by Kirk Schneider and Rollo May), pp. 14-15

Oh come on,'Pheobe continued. 'You're asking for it. Pale skin, black clothes, no lunch and that whole brooding thing? It's hilarious. You should get body glitter and go after an unsuspecting freshman.' 'You should!' Cassidy agreed. 'Tell her you're a dangerous monster. And mention how good her blood smells.' 'Wrong time of the month on that one, and I'm getting slapped,' I muttered, and everyone laughed.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. You draw up an X axis and a Y axis, where a positive slope represents a positive attitude, plot some points, and there you go. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.

we have arrived at a new pagan society, in some ways worse than pagan societies of the past. At least pagans in Roman and Greek society still accepted reality. But now our society has tried to change the evidence.

I go fishing in my mind. I put out bait, the bait of my own longing, my desire, and my hunger for connection, for a tug of something alive at the end of a line. Something that I may have to struggle with to pull in, but that will be wild and important to me, whether I keep it or let it go.

There's a word for it," she told me, "in French, for when you have a lingering immersion of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explores and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.

There's a word for it," she told me, "in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explores and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.

I thought bridesmaid's dresses were supposed to be horrid and ugly to make the bride more stunning," I joked to her in a whisper. "Yeah right, you marry a gorgeous actor and you want me to show up in a Goodwill special? No way sister! There are bound to be other single, gorgeous actors around, and I intend to land one of them for myself. Or get laid at the very least."...

Eastwood was distorted for me, a picturesque place meant to lull its residents into believing that behind our gates and beyond our curfew, nothing bad could ever happen with any sort of permanence. It was a place so fatally flawed that it refused to acknowledge that any such imperfection was possible.

At Latham House, we were asked to believe in unlikely miracles. In second chances. We woke up each morning hoping that the odds had somehow swung in our favor. But that’s the thing about odds. Roll a die twice, and you expect two different results. Except it doesn’t work that way. You could roll the same side over and over again, the laws of the universe intact and unchanging with each turn. It’s only when you consider the past that the odds change. That things become less and less likely. Here’s something I know because I’m a nerd: up until the middle of the twentieth century, dice were made out of cellulose nitrate. It’s a material that remains stable for decades but, in a flash, can decompose. The chemical compound breaks down, releasing nitric acid. So every time you roll a die, there’s a small chance that it won’t give you a result at all, that instead it will cleave, crumble, and explode.

they began to kill the innocents in their mother’s womb because these babies are hindering them from achieving what they believe is their self-realization through pleasures, a false freedom, and worldly success. Then they eliminate sick people; then the handicapped, for instance those with Down syndrome, and so on. This is the path of the new dictatorship, patterned after the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and the Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union. This is a process which leads ultimately to an exasperated egoism, to a cruel and inhuman society.

Some photographers could vomit on a piece of paper and call it art, you know... Hang it in the Guggenheim, or whatever. Sell a print for two hundred pounds? But I can't do that. I just-- Maybe I have too much respect for walls... or something.

Collaborations are the black holes of knowledge regimes. They willingly produce nothingness, opulence and ill behavior. And it is their very vacuity that is their strength...It does not entail the transmission of something from those who have to those who do not, but rather the setting in motion of a chain of unforeseen accesses.

I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day, I'll have a body full of cells that were never sick. sbut it also means that the parts of me that knee and loved Sadie will disappear. I'll still remember loving her, but it'll be a different me who loved her. And maybe that is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency.

Now, as a modern-day Viking cat, you’d think I’d bat the jowls of Crime with rapid-fire paws. But when I trotted along the riverpath that shockingly snowy night of June 1 and stumbled upon the beaten and bloodied corpse, I wasn’t in my most Vikingest state.

Freemasonry’s goal is to demonstrate that, in the end, man is god, that man is the one who determines what is good and what is evil. Abortion, gender ideology, and the systematic and demagogic manipulation of the truth in the mass media, for example, correspond to the basic theoretical principles of Freemasonry, in so far as they are Gnostic.

Young people," McDonald said contemptuously. "You always think there's something to find out." "Yes, sir," Andrews said. "Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you--that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old." "No," Andrews said. A vague terror crept from the darkness that surrounded them, and tightened his voice. "That's not the way it is." "You ain't learned, then," McDonald said. "You ain't learned yet....look. You spend nearly a year of your life and sweat, because you have faith in the dream of a fool. And what have you got? Nothing. You kill three, four thousand buffalo, and stack their skins neat; and the buffalo will rot wherever you left them, and the rats will nest in the skins. What have you got to show? A year gone out of your life, a busted wagon that a beaver might use to make a dam with, some calluses on your hands, and the memory of a dead man." "No," Andrew said. "That's not all. That's not all I have." "Then what? What have you got?" Andrews was silent. "You can't answer. Look at Miller. Knows the country he was in as well as any man alive, and had faith in what he believed was true. What good did it do him? And Charley Hoge with his Bible and his whisky. Did that make your winter any easier, or save your hides? And Schneider. What about Schneider? Was that his name? "That was his name," Andrews said. "And that's all that's left of him," McDonald said. "His name. And he didn't even come out of it with that for himself." McDonald nodded, not looking at Andrews. "Sure, I know. I came out of it with nothing, too. Because I forgot what I learned a long time ago. I let the lies come back. I had a dream, too, and because it was different from yours and Miller's, I let myself think it wasn't a dream. But now I know, boy. And you don't. And that makes all the difference.

There is the grievous fact of the loss of Eucharistic fragments because of Communion in the hand. No one can deny this. Fragments of the consecrated host fall to the floor and are subsequently crushed by feet. This is horrible! Our God is trampled on in our churches! No one can deny it. This is happening on a large scale. We cannot continue as if Jesus our God is not really present, as though the Eucharist is only bread. As I said before, the modern practice of Communion in the hand has nothing to do with the practice in the ancient Church.

When our hopes for performance are not completely met, realistic optimism involves accepting what cannot now be changed, rather than condemning or second-guessing ourselves. Focusing on the successful aspects of performance (even when the success is modest) promotes positive affect, reduces self-doubt, and helps to maintain motivation (e.g., McFarland & Ross, 1982).... Nevertheless, realistic optimism does not include or imply expectations that things will improve on their own. Wishful thinking of this sort typically has no reliable supporting evidence. Instead, the opportunity-seeking component of realistic optimism motivates efforts to improve future performances on the basis of what has been learned from past performances.

How can you speak of civilization when you are perpetrating a mass genocide of innocent people in the wombs of their mothers, which is extremely cruel and whose extent has never existed in all of human history—killing innocent people, your own babies on a mass scale? For me, the existence of abortion in society is already an indication that there is no real civilization.

Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, that the people buying milk in their pajamas or picking their noses at stoplights could only be moments away from disaster. That everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment when it will become extraordinary--a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen.

I was listening to this playlist I’d made for her, headphones clamped over my ears. It was the story of us in music, except it wasn’t finished yet. I had this plan that I’d add a new song every month, so that the playlist would keep going as long as we did. It was sort of an electronic version of adopting a tree, which I’d done in the Carbon Footprint Awareness Club, but only because it had looked good, not because I’d actually wanted to. Keeping a playlist alive sounded much more me.

Single people want relationships, settled people wonder if they’re missing out on something, traveling types miss stability, stable ones are restless, old friends want new friends, new friends miss old friends, and basically almost everyone my age has some dangling worry trailing around after them everywhere that they’re somehow not doing everything, that what they’re doing is not altogether the right thing, that they are missing out. … Do not be ashamed. The doubt is natural, and everyone you know – yes, even that person – carries it sometimes too. Allow yourself to be peaceful. Allow yourself satisfaction in what you have. If you really don’t like it, allow yourself permission to make changes.

If we define optimism broadly as the tendency to maintain a positive outlook, then realistic optimism is the tendency to maintain a positive outlook within the constraints of the available "measurable phenomena situated in the physical and social world" (DeGrandpre, 2000, p. 733). With respect to fuzzy meaning, realistic optimism involves enhancing and focusing on the favorable aspects of our experiences. Examples include being lenient in our evaluation of past events, actively appreciating the positive aspects of our current situation, and routinely emphasizing possible opportunities for the future. With respect to fuzzy knowledge, realistic optimism involves hoping, aspiring, and searching for positive experiences while acknowledging what we do not know and accepting what we cannot know.

If we can't forget, how can we forgive? I believe that forgiving can't be done by willpower alone. I can will myself to write out my own memories and feelings. I can will myself to imagine onto the page how someone else may have felt. I can will myself to research someone else's life in order to better understand what happened. But I don't think I can forgive by simply willing to forgive. Forgiving happens to us when our hearts are ready. Sometimes it takes the form of working on our own story until quietly, often surprisingly, we simply let go of the hurt. Sometimes forgiving makes it possible to pick up the pieces of a broken relationship and begin again. Sometimes it means letting a relationship go. We can't forgive through willpower. What we can do is work toward readiness of heart. Writing as a spiritual practice can be that kind of work. When our heart is ready, we often don't even know it until forgiveness happens within us. It is a gift.

She was right, though, in the end. I never should have given her so much credit. It all got tangled together, her appearance and Toby coming back into my life and the first time I ever read a book that spoke to me, and the question of who I wanted to be in the aftermath of my personal tragedy. Because I made a decision that year, to start mattering in a way that had nothing to do with sports teams or plastic crowns, and the reality is, I might have made that decision without her, or if I’d never fallen in love with a girl who considered love to be the biggest disaster of all. The truth of it was, I’d been running the wrong experiment my whole life, and while Cassidy was the first person to realize, she didn’t add the elements that allowed me to proceed down a different path. She lent a spark, perhaps, or tendered the flame, but the arson was mine. Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spent a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.