disillusionment

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.

Elisabeth had not had her future and her parents had not had theirs, there was nothing to this so-called future which was always promised to the young.

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

Pandora's Box could not be unopened, no one could return to Eden.

The world is a cruel place, Petrosinella, and it wounds the weak.

Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders.

I__e drawn this as a circle because the seasons will come and go. Joy always leads to another season of romance . . . which always leads to another season of trouble . . . which always leads to disillusionment . . . which always leads to more joy_ if you hang in there.

Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it__ adhering to our scripts or not.

The piercing fanfare of the brass against the brutal boom and rattle of the drums surged through the air. At the head of the Ferris band marched the drum majorette. A crimson and white shako crowned her long dark hair which flew out behind her and across her radiant face flushed with excitement. Her blue eyes flashed and her smile registered triumph at having been chosen.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.

Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven't realized that todayis tomorrow's nostalgia.

I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.

You are very harsh.''I have seen the world.

The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there.

Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it.

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.

It had been an awful thing to lose Henry the first time, to matrimony, but to discover what a false front he was capable of was another kind of blow, and it had left her almost speechless. Then there was the fury with herself__or she had known what Henry__ love was, and still she had gone back to suffer a little more at his hands.