For Leslie who taught me to fly.
Soon as you realize you’re immortal,” he said, “declare the power of Love even when it seems invisible, you’ll go far beyond the illusions of space and time. In all history, the one power you never lose is your power of letting go of space and time, the joy of dying that is no wicked thing, it comes in love, to everyone.
The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.
A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.
To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,” he said, “you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.” The trick, according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing himself as trapped inside a limited body that had a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.
Are you saying I can fly?” “I say you are free.
Once we visit death, once we see the beauty waiting for us, our fear’s gone. Used to be never a book written, of our experience with dying. Now there are shelves, waiting to be read. The beliefs, the experiences of so many others, now.
There was a lot I didn’t understand about messiahs.
Until he found that bird, life would remain gray and bleak, illogical, without purpose; every seagull would remain a coincidental collection of blood and feathers pointed toward oblivion.
I didn’t see how that applied to me, and reminded myself never to let a book replace my own thinking.
Family is not necessarily made of blood, but of those you meet along the way.
The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.
No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.
We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.
His vows of a moment before were forgotten, swept away in that great swift wind. Yet he felt guiltless, breaking the promises he had made himself. Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of promise.
Stand to Center meant only great shame or great honor.
Life is the unknown and the unknowable, except that we are put into this world to eat, to stay alive as lone as we possibly can.
In the days that followed, Jonathan saw that there was as much to learn about flight in this place as there had been in the life behind him. But with a difference. Here were gulls who thought as he thought. For each of them, the most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they most loved to do, and that was to fly. They were magnificent birds, all of them, and they spent hour after hour every day practicing flight, testing advanced aeronautics.
Look with the help of understanding, explore that what you already know...
Those who fly the highest see the furthest.