Not all who wander are lost. – J.R.R. Tolkien
And perhaps…
Not all who are lost go wandering.
Though a wanderer may never leave home.
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false and true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. – W.B. Yeats
Cast the net of judgment and you yourself determine the catch; attempt to cast the net of understanding, and you will find it painfully caught on your own heart.
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.” — Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Gandalf: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be to eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” — J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
We are so ambiguously fragile.
“The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.” — Ernest Hemingway, Farewell to Arms
“I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.”– Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
The performance ends, the curtain falls, but backstage…
“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one we must all take. The grey rain curtain of this world falls back, and all changes to silver glass, and then you see it. White shores and beyond. The far green country under a swift sunrise” ― J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord Of the Rings
“Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Of falling in love and falling into being whilst falling apart…
“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
– Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
It is only the end part that is inevitable. The way you reach it? Now that’s a story you should make worth telling.
“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”
– Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
“Home is behind, the world ahead, And there are many paths to tread Through shadows to the edge of night, Until the stars are all alight. Then world behind and home ahead, We’ll wander back and home to bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade!”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
For as much as man tries to mold, he is molded; for as hard as he struggles to incite change, he is changed…
“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires–we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.”
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
“Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is another kind of clay.”
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Disclaimer: The title of this post is misleading.
I had a funny thought and I figured I would share for lack of any other worthy ideas coupled with a need for writing something. In my attempts to produce a British accent, I have noticed that my voice becomes deeper, which pleases me immeasurably. And so I have been trying. And by trying, I mean that I have been trying everyone’s patience with pathetic attempts to lower my voice and heighten my perceived intelligence by sounding…inane. And then I began thinking (a particular talent of mine) about ways to improve my British accent and subsequently waded though a wikihow article, a couple of youtube videos and a moment of despair, before the funny though made its landing. Brace for anticlimactic impact. There are ESL (English as a Second Language) schools, correct? Well, what if there were BSE schools? And by BSE I mean British as a Second English schools! Whoa! And when it landed, the thought did so in a funny manner — I was present, it happened, it was funny. Maybe you just had to be there.
Herman Hesse and Herman Melville shared more than a given name – they shared a reverence for rivers and oceans and what lies therein. Fortunately, unlike Narcissus, they saw the depth beyond the reflective surface and dove in, pen in hand.
“But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“He was taught by the river. Incessantly, he learned from it. Most of all, he learned from it to listen, to pay close attention with a quiet heart, with a waiting, opened soul, without passion, without a wish, without judgement, without an opinion.”
“The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
“The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
CloudLair 