h. murakami, south of the border, west of the sun
what confused and disappointed me, though, was that i could never discover within her something special that existed just for me.
elliot alderson, mr.robot, s2e3
maybe it’s not about avoiding the crash. but it’s about setting a breakpoint to find the flaw in the code, fix it, and carry on until we hit the next flaw. the quest to keep going, to always fight for footing.
maybe we’re all just stumbling from the right questions to the wrong answers, or from the right answers to the wrong questions. it doesn’t matter where you go or where you come from, as long as you keep stumbling.
maybe that’s all it takes… maybe that’s as good as it gets.
poised for grace, douglas brooks on the bhagavad gita
nothing of value can be accomplished without knowing who you really are and what kinds of choices are truly viable. abhinavagupta calls this ‘following your own nature’ and evokes a powerful image by asking rhetorically, “how can a fawn with unsteady legs walk about in the presence of a young lion who might tear him to shreds?
the answer lies in being entirely comfortable in your own nature and appreciating fully that of another.
david foster wallace
that our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home … that, finally, the door opens… and it opens outward – we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.
london fields, martin amis
what could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time before sleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little death when the mind was still alive and fluttering.
tilda swinton
a while ago, once again up against someone close to me dying, i worked out that, in a nutshell, when the chips are down, my basic battery is charged by the endlessly reliable generators of Nature and Friendship: beyond any other thing, these two influences that never fail to buoy and nourish me.
this, of course, is very close to what Eve in Only Lovers knows and values: the company of fellow travelers, the slow burn, the long view—and the perpetual guiding change of nature. both are bigger than us; they support and carry us. we can fly at the back of the formation they form and take our place as a part of patterns they make … we set out to make something about companionship and wonder in the face of bitterness and disillusionment—and we set out to hope that companionship and wonder might win.
anais nin
my mission, should i choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what i am. to take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that i can’t be loved as I am.
marisha pessl, special topics in calamity physics
as far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the taj mahal to the siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion — usually while he’s lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in indochina. it is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home.
after 73 years of anguish i have found a cure, however. you must go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine, without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes and latitudes. only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular view in front of you.
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
we met at the wrong time. that’s what i keep telling myself anyway. maybe one day years from now, we’ll meet in a coffee shop in a far away city somewhere and we could give it another shot.
jamie tworkowski
you’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else, you will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.
cloud atlas
& only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.
yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?