thought-provoking

What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for your own life, do you ever really exist at all?

What happens when you don't know the truth but you can't believe the lies, when you can't find a way--through fact or fiction--to give meaning to your own existence? Without a narrative for you own life, do you ever really exist at all?

Why are we so afraid to die? Are we concerned about the reckoning we may have to face on the other side? Or does the thought of our nonexistence terrify us? Perhaps neither. Perhaps what we fear most is no longer being able to do the things we love.

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

Careful. When you dabble too much with reason life becomes nothing but a process of dying.

Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents_ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.

If life and youth were not immune to the corrosive effects of time, why should love be any different?

As long as there's life, there's hope.

And it was the speed that provided some solace. For if it moved like that, it would always move like that, and somehow, because of it, things change, somehow things end.

There's a problem with continually stamping down on the least sensible instincts that drive men to recklessly endanger themselves. Even the most reasonable and level-headed of us have only limited space to store such unwanted emotion. You keep putting the stuff away, shoving it to the back of your mind but like an over-full cupboard there comes a point where you try to cram one more thing into it and all of a sudden something snaps, the catch gives, the door bursts open and everything inside spills out on top of you.

Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it's too much.

The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long time might be wrong. That's all. Not that it is. Just that it might be. I don't know why it is, but we tend to fall in love with things we believe, Threaten them, and you threaten us.

It's not the small of her back, her thighs, or her chest or eyes that matter most. It's the parts of her she's afraid to show that you should get to know.

No, I mean, this is a problem that most people have. A problem of the human condition. We get ahold of some kind of shorthand in understanding people, and we think it works, and we use it to assess, categorize, and then, very often, dismiss people. It's the basis for stereotyping, profiling, and several other very sorry words that end in i-n-g.

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul.

There is nothing sexier than sword fight.

We pick the people who populate our personal lives as much for who they make us as for who they are. I chose Anna for the person I became in her presence, and in this respect, my love for her was a more selfish one

And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living.