reflection

In a polished surface of metal I happen to notice my reflected face; it wears a pale, beaten lonely look, eyes looking out at nothing with an expression of fear, frightened and lonely in a nightmare world. Something, I don__ know what, makes me think of my childhood; I remember myself as a schoolchild sitting at a hard wooden desk, and then as a little girl with thick, fair, wind-tossed hair, feeding the swans in a park. And it seems both strange and sad to me that all those childish years were spent in preparation for this _ that, forgotten by everybody, with a beaten face, I should serve machinery in a place far away from the sun.

I'm a queen with or without a king. Chasing anything is beneath me. Until you're ready to put away childish things and be my man, my king, someone I can trust to shepard my soul to the Almighty I have to decline being your wife. I love you with all my heart and soul, but my salvation, life, health, and legacy has to come first now.

The passionate heart touches the sky. The meditative mind enters it.

We think we've seen it all before, we think we know it all by heart.

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends__ooks__t__ because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: __hat did they think of us?____id we make a mistake and say something tactless?____id they like us?___or is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.

The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.

I had an uneventful few days," it told her. "The most exciting thing was an hour-long lecture from the headmaster on taking our studies seriously. He said next year's exam will arrive sooner than we think.""No, they won't," Valkyrie said, frowning. "They'll arrive next year, exactly when we expect them.""That's what I told him," the reflection nodded. "I don't think he's comfortable with logic, because he didn't look happy. He sent me to the Career Guidance counsellor, who asked me what I wanted to do after college."Valkyrie stowed her black clothes. "What did you say?""I told her I wanted to be a Career Guidance counsellor. She started crying, then accused me of mocking her. I told her if she wasn't happy in her job then she should look at other options, then pointed out that I was already doing her job better than she was. She gave me detention.

Maybe the point of life (and youth, once it was over), was to elevate yourself, through time and reflection, into something worthy of contemplation (even if you were the only one doing the contemplating).

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

Time passes: yesterday has gone for ever but tomorrow never comes. Let's make the most of today.

Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy ready-made things in the shops. But since there are no shops where you can buy friends, men no longer have any friends.

The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.

One of the salient facts of a self is that a person is constantly undergoing a series of actions in the immediacy of time that they must later reflect upon and synthesize new experiences, thoughts, feelings, and mental impression along with their latent memories into a collaborative sense of being.

Take time daily to reflect on how much you have. It may not be all that you want but remember someone somewhere is dreaming to have what you have.