Life was like the ice on an early-winter pond: more fragile than it appeared to be, riddled by hidden fractures, with a cold darkness below.
Sometimes the heart makes decisions the mind cannot, and though we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by suffering.
It’s difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide.
We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.
Eventually he understood that he was crying for himself. He was ashamed of the man whom he had become, mourning the man whom he had expected to be when he’d been a boy.
Stormy Llewellyn didn’t want a pedestal. She wanted only someone who would look her straight in the eyes and always tell her the truth.
Their perpetual readiness for play is endearing, and their willingness to forgive deception time after time is one of the key differences between the heart of a dog and the human heart. Trixie.
With friends, this is a cool world; without friends, it would be unbearably cold.
Although my perception might have been distorted by melancholy, it seemed to me that most of those people were in pairs, the larger percentage of them holding hands, as if they were extras in a movie of high romance, accessorizing a scene for which the director’s purpose might have been to say that life was a parade lived two-by-two, as it had been since before Noah’s fabled ark and as it would be always.
Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.
Therefore, she would have to open herself to all the experiences that her new life provided, including the awful possibility of rejection and severe disappointment. Without risk, there was no hope of gain.
So,” said the Russian, after regaining is composure, “the lesson of the model is that the universe – – all its matter and forms of energy – – arise out of thought.
Humanity is capable of any atrocity,” she said. “But when you understand the extent of this cruelty, the unprecedented viciousness, the immense scale of the horror, it seems beyond the power of mere people to conceive and execute. It seems demonic.
We are destined to be together forever. We have a card that says so. Gypsy Mummy is never wrong.
Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but the future will come as it comes and will not be hurried.
These days, all I ask Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another.
Initially the snow had been beautiful, but not so much now. The softness and sparkle still charmed, but the storm occluded the sky, denying us the stars. At the moment, I needed to see a firmament of stars, needed to gaze past the moon and through the constellations, needed to see what can’t be seen – infinity.
Someone said that everyone should stay back, so as not to stress me, but I said no. I said I wanted to see them all, to see people. I wanted to see not just the people I loved and the people I knew, but also the people I didn’t know. I wanted to see people, because people had been my life, the good and bad, but always so many more good people than bad. They had been my life, and I did not want to die without the faces of people as the last thing I saw of that beautiful and mysterious world.
Hope, love, and faith are in the waiting.
In the folklore of the British Isles, a bodach is a vile beast that slithers down chimneys at night and carries off children who misbehave. Rather like Inland Revenue agents.