philosophical

Please, God,' Ruth would pray, 'don't let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams.'She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler's bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

Devils so work that things which are not, appear to men as if they were real.

It saddens me beyond my tears that love is lost within the fears.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us.

I have never since entirely freed myself of the impression that this life is a segment of existence which is enacted in a three-dimensional boxlike universe especially set up for it.

You have to set somebody free for them to return

I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.

Whatever life throws at me, I'll take with a smile upon my face and Nirvana's 'Bleach' on the stereo.

Life has taught me one supreme lesson. This is that we must__f we are really to live at all, if we are to enjoy the life more abundant promised by the Sages of Wisdom__e must put our convictions into action. My remuneration has been that I have been privileged to act out my faith.

For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact.

But if I decide to decide there__ a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won__ the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

Devil-boy Jack: "A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back."Thaniel Fox: "There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one's pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of."Devil-boy Jack: "I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way.

The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

The things that matter don't necessarily make sense.

I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by - that one guy. David Frost. 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood-' You know this poem, right? 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-""I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can't travel both? That seemed really unfair to me.