I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what i am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, i will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that i will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are nobel, i will love you ; if you are not, i will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; i will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine and all men's , however long we have dwelt in lies, to live the truth.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape - into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city. Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust... and the smell of dust. Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn‘t met you yet; you‘re hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle - and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn‘t there. And the tapes ends..
If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated.
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- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.
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- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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- Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
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- On The Road by Jack Kerouac
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- William Gibson, Fragments of a Hologram Rose.
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- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated.
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