When we are children, we believe that our elders know all and that even when we cannot understand the world, they can make sense of it. Even after we are grown, in moments of fear or sorrow, we still turn instinctively to the older generation, hoping to finally learn some great hidden lesson about death and pain. Only to learn instead that the only lesson is that life goes on.
To finally confront the worst there is, to look it squarely in the face and say, “I know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still I live. And I will go on living.
Oh, my boy. The best mistake Chivalry ever made was you. Go on now.
Our own ambitions and tasks that we set for ourselves, the framework we attempt to impose upon the world, is no more than a shadow of a tree cast across the snow. It will change as the sun moves, be swallowed in the night, sway with the wind, and when the smooth snow vanishes, it will lie distorted upon the uneven earth. But the tree continues to be. Do you understand that?
One man armed with the right word may do what an army of swordsmen cannot.
If you don’t decide what you will do with the rest of your life, someone else will decide it for you.
There are always choices. But sometimes there are no good ones.
If a few students come reluctantly to their studies, then let them go. If all students come reluctantly to their studies, then let your scribe be dismissed and find another. For once students have been taught that learning is tedious, difficult, and useless, they will never learn another lesson.
He smiled, and reminded me that no man could make time, but only use that which he was given wisely.
A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.
Still I promise myself, “Next time I will do better” in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a “next time.
The loneliness that can never be filled by anyone except the one whose loss created the absence;.
You’re not who he expected you to be; that doesn’t mean you aren’t somebody. Nor are you perfect. Stop using every mistake you make as an excuse to fail completely.
I found myself speaking softly as if I were telling an old tale to a young child. And giving it a happy ending, when all know that tales never end, and the happy ending is but a moment to catch one’s breath before the next disaster.
That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.
I told you it was foolish. But feelings do not have to be wise. Feelings just are.
Maybe you have to keep your pain and loss to know that you can survive whatever life deals you. Perhaps without putting your pain in its place in your life, you became something of a coward.
Name it as you will, claim it as you will, the world does not belong to men. Men belong to the world. You will not own the earth that eventually your body will become, nor will it recall the name it once answered to.
Dragons don’t bother with introductions.
Regrets are useless, ” the Fool replied. “All you can do is start from where you are.