the untutored chatterings of

(updated as new ones that relate to my life or soul or mood or humour pop up)

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times." ~ Annie Dillard, Holy the FIrm (from Into the Wild, p200)

"No. Not this girl. Not this day." ~ Spike, Angel S6

"She doesn't bite. Well... not Hard anyway." ~ about me, from out of the mouths of babes

"If I had told you, you wouldn't have seen the Pyramids. They're beautiful aren't they?" ~ Paulo Coelho

"Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise and bake and come back to haunt you. I've made far too many wishes in my lifetime...." ~ Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen

"A thousand times he searched for her eyes and a thousand times she found his. It was a kind of sad dance, secret and impotent."
~ Alessandro Baricco, Silk

"Think she'll hold together?" "She's tore aplenty, but she'll hold true." ~ Firefly, Mel and Zoey, respectively

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time." ~ Albert Camus

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it . . ." murmurs Lord Henry. "Resist it and the soul grows sick with longing." ~ Oscar Wilde

"These fragile bodies of touch and taste
This fragrant skin, this hair like lace
Spirits open to thrust of grace,
Never a breath you can't afford to waste." ~ Barenaked Ladies

"Do not walk in front of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk
behind me, for I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my
friend." --Albert Camus

"The bitterest tears shed over a grave are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone" ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own." ~ Paulo Coelho

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." ~ Douglas Adams

"Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me..." ~ Joss Whedon

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night." ~ Edgar Allan Poe

"Everything has its own place and function. That applies to people, although many don't seem to realize it, stuck as they are in the wrong job, the wrong marriage, or the wrong house. When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don't belong." ~ The Tao of Pooh


"I don't want to find out one day that I'm at the end of someone else's life."
- Denys, Out of Africa

"Singing come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I part of the cure
Or am I part of the disease" ~ Coldplay

“So long sweet summer. I stumbled upon you and gratefully basked in your rays.” ~ Dashboard Confessional

"Your love for me is impotent
Yet I’ll live to a hundred on its fumes alone."

"The heart dies
a slow death.
Shedding each hope like leaves,
until one day there are none.
No hopes.
Nothing remains."
~ Memoirs of a Geisha

"You know, we can get together... once in a while, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, but...."
"Once in a while? Every four fuckin' years?"
"Well, if you can't fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it."
"For how long?"
"As long as we can ride it.... There ain't no reins on this one."
~ Brokeback Mountain

"To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." ~ Karen Sunde

"And I still hold your hand in mine.
In mine when I'm asleep." ~ James Blunt

"The line between love and obsession is drawn by only circumstance." ~ Anonymous

"I pity the men whose natural pleasures are burthens, and who fly from joy ... as if it was really an evil in itself.... Poor unfortunate creature that he is! as if the causes of anguish in the heart were not enow—but he must fill up the measure, with those of caprice; and not only walk in a vain shadow,—but disquiet himself in vain too."
~ Laurence Sterne


"If he came to me as a bear or a deer, I would still know him. If I were blind, if it was at dusk, if a hundred years had passed, I'd still know him. That couldn't be taken away, despite ruin, despite time." ~ Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen

"Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be." ~ Anton Chekhov

"One must not lose desires. They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love, and to long life."
~ Alexander A. Bogomoletz

"If you greatly desire something, have the guts to stake everything on obtaining it."
~ Brendan Francis

"Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command." ~ Alan Watts

"To know the Way,
We go the Way"
~ Camino a Cumbemayo

"To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides."
~ David Viscott

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
~ H. L. Mencken

"Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come into contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered a state of holiness or of madness."
~ Faubourg Saint-Peres, as quoted by Paulo Coelho

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen."
~
Sean O'Faolain

"Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality."
~ Jules de Gaultier

"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
~ George Bernard Shaw

"A silent end. The great sea all around her was almost flat calm. The enemy was within her, not before her. And all her strength was as nothing, against an enemy like that. I have seen many lives wrecked in that absurd way. But ships, never."
~ Alessandro Baricco

"You stole my heart, but forgot to return it when you were done. I can’t really feel without it. Everything is distant and removed."

"I used to think that only death would take someone away from me. But I had learned that so many lesser things can steal someone away, just as completely, just as forever. They live, they breathe, but you never get to touch them, you never see them nude, you never wake to their smile, the smell of their skin on your sheets. There are things so much less dramatic than death that are just as permanent."
~ Anita Blake

"What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose one doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost, until he find it?"
~ Luke 15:4, as quoted by Paulo Coelho

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
~ Epicurus

"I don’t know. If I had a life ahead of me - I who am about to die - I would spend it telling this story, without ever stopping, a thousand times, so as to understand why truth gives itself over only to horror, and to arrive at it we have had to pass through this inferno, to see it we have had to destroy one another, to have it we have had to become ferocious beasts, to flush it out we have had to rack ourselves with pain. And to be true men we have had to die. Why? Why do things become true only in the grip of desperation? Who has turned the world around this way, so that the truth must be on the dark side, and the repulsive swamps of forsaken humanity is the only loathsome earth in which there grows the only things that is not a lie? And in the end: What truth can this be, that stinks of corpses, and flourishes in blood, feeds on pain, and lives where a man humiliates himself, and triumph where man rots? Whose truth is this? Is it a truth for us? Back ashore, during those winters, I use to imagine a truth that was tranquility, womb, alleviation, mercy, and sweetness. It was a truth made for us. Which expected us, and would have looked down on us, like a mother found anew. But here, in the womb of the sea, I have seen truth make its nest, meticulous and perfect: and what I saw was a bird of prey, magnificent in flight, and ferocious. I don’t know. This wasn’t what I dreamed of, in the winter, when I used to dream of this."
~ Alessandro Baricco


"...the elements most drawn to each other are the ones that destroy each other."
~ Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen


"Whenever I'm alone with you,
You make me feel like I am home again.
Whenever I'm alone with you,
You make me feel like I am whole again." ~ The Cure



"You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


"When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
And I have become
Comfortably numb." ~ Pink Flyod


"It is pretty crazy being a mom - insanity begets epiphany."~ My friend Jane on becoming a new mom

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." ~ Ernest Hemingway

"Atmen Sie durch meine Ohren." :p


"How I wish I'd chosen darkness from cold.
How I wish I had screamed out loud,
Instead I've found no meaning." ~ James Blunt

"Why'd you leave?" "Problems with a male." "Boyfriend?" "Kind of." "And you left him just like that?" "It's the only way to leave. 'I don't love you anymore. Goodbye.'" "Supposing you do still love him?" "You don't leave." "You've never left someone you still love?" "No." ~ Closer


“It is kind of a mystery, but you must try to understand using your imagination, and forgetting what is known so that fancy may roam free, running far off deep within things until it can see how the soul is not always a diamond but sometimes a silken veil-this i can understand-imagine a diaphanous silken veil, anything could tear it, even a glance, and think of the hand that takes it-a woman's hand-yes-it moves slowly and clasps the veil between the fingers, but clasping is already too much, the hand lifts it as if it were not a hand but a puff of wind and enfolds it between the fingers as if they were not fingers but... as if they were not fingers but thoughts. So. This room is that hand, and my daughter is a silken veil.” ~ Alessandro Baricco

"Dreams that do come true can be as unsettling as those that don't." ~ Brett Butler

"Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


“You are a rare flower.”


"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind, 'Pooh!', he whispered. 'Yes, Piglet?' 'Nothing.', said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw. 'I just wanted to be sure of you'" ~ The Tao of Pooh


“Goodbye,” said Eeyore. “Mind you don’t get blown away, little Piglet. You’d be missed. People would say, ‘Where’s little Piglet been blown to?’” ~ Winnie the Pooh


"What makes the desert beautiful," says the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


"Pie, Pie, Me-Oh-My."

"You have this way of dipping in and out of sight
as things collide.
Bridges burning softly in the night.
You have a way of falling in and out of time
as it goes by
passing silently with no goodbye.
...
You have this way of meaning everything and nothing to me
at the same time.
Returning my Hello's with Goodbye's
And I've spoken with all the other angels
they don't know what to do.
And I agree with them whole-heartedly,
I do." ~ Maroon 5


"I would like to do for him what he did for me. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I realize that I didn't go into that cafe by chance; really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.
Generally speaking, these meeting occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itslef, and our universe changes direction....)" ~ Paulo Coelho


"Last time I saw you we had just split in two. You were looking at me. I was looking at you. You had a way so familiar, But I could not recognize, Cause you had blood on your face; I had blood in my eyes. But I could swear by your expression that the pain down in your soul was the same as the one down in mine." ~ Origin of Love


“And I don't think that I'll see her again,
But we shared a moment that will last till the end.” ~ James Blunt


"These wounds won't seem to heal
This pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase." ~ Evanescence

"There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy." ~ Jean Anouilh

“There’s some people you know to forgive even if you see them only one time or two. In the end, my dear sweet friend, I’ll remember you.” ~ from Masked and Anonymous


“And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.” ~ William Blake


"He lived among marvels. For this reason a preestablished and maniacal order reigned in his house while his life flowed along in accordance with an immutable geometry of habits that came close to the holiness of a liturgy. He defended himself, did Langlais. He bound up his own existence with a web of extremely elaborate rules capable of cushioning the dizzying effects of the images to which, every day, he opened his mind. The hyperboles that reached him from all the seas of the world subsided against the meticulous dike delineated by those minute certainties. One step farther on, the placid lake that was Langlais's wisdom awaited them. Still and just." ~ Alessandro Baricco


"and so it is
just like you said it should be
we'll both forget the breeze
most of the time" ~ Damien Rice


“Soon my Angel came again;
I was arm'd, he came in vain:
For the time of youth was fled
And grey hairs were on my head.” ~ William Blake


"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love".
~ Neil Gaiman

I saw you this morning.
You were moving so fast.
Can't seem to loosen my grip
On the past.
And I miss you so much
There's no one in sight.
And we're still making love
In my secret life...
~ In my secret life, Leonard cohen


"Besides, it is not as if life goes as you think it does. Life follows its path. And you follow yours. And it is not the same path. And so... It is not that I wanted to be happy, no. I wanted... to save myself, that's all: to save myself. But I understood late the path one should follow: the path of the desires. One expects other things to save people. Duty, honesty, being good, being just. No. It is the desires that save. They are the only real thing. You stick with them, and you will save yourself. But I found this out too late. If you give life the time, it will turn things around in a strange, inexorable way: and at that point you realize that you cannot desire something without hurting yourself. That's where everything falls apart, there's no way out, the more you struggle, the more tangled the net becomes, the more you rebel, the more you hurt yourself. There's no escape. When it was too late, I began to desire. With all my strength I possessed. You cannot imagine how very badly I hurt myself."
~ Alessandro Baricco


"Slowly Mick pressed the back of his hands against his eyes and rubbed gently. There's no one there. There's no one there. No one there. No one there, except the sound of a chair sliding across the terrazzo floor and the gentle bump of her knee into the low glass table." ~ MDD


"He tilted his head sideways, a ghost of a smile feinting across his face, eyes narrowing and wrinkling crows feet lit the corners of his souls escape.
Inside was turmoil and bubbling energy, the knots twisted tighter and constricted around his panic. The pain ebbed and flowed and coursed through his body - pleasure and pain, knowing and blinding. He reached across the table and grasped the neck of the bottle tightly. Draining its essence into his, they intermingled and cleansed his immortality until finally he started to feel relief from his honesty.
Outside he sat calm and contemplative, thoughts and dreams darting and weaving creating the fabric of life suffusing him through the cacophony of his pounding heart.
Today he would start living honestly in imaginary circumstances for the first time." ~ MDD


"He knew that Adams was a man destroyed by his own life. In his mind's eye, Adam's soul was a peaceful village sacked and dispersed by the savage invasion of a dizzying number of images, sensations, odors, sounds, pains, words. The death he simulated, to look at him, was the paradoxical result of a life that had exploded. An uncontrollable chaos was what crackled away below his silence and immobility."
~ Alessandro Baricco

"Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take is a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression.... It was as if the agony that one inflicted on the other was necessary, fundamental to life."
~ Paulo Coelho

"And in fact these words arrived all perfectly prepared in Father Pluche's head, all lined up in a nice neat row, but they came a fraction late, just enough time to be overtaken by a stupid gust of words that no sooner emerged on the surface of the silence that they crystallized into the incontrovertible brilliance of a question that was completely out of place."
~ Alessandro Baricco


"You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen to people who break easily, 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, your eyes drop out and you get loose 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."
... said the Skin Horse to the Velveteen Rabbit."


"In all the languages in the world, there is the same proverb: "What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over." Well, I say there isn't an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. If we're in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we're far from the person we love, every person we pass in the street reminds us of them."
~ Paulo Coelho



"I have been known in many ways, but am known only by one person. And that is enough for me."


"I can certainly cause ripples, lord knows I’ve cannon-balled from great heights to even greater depths.
The ripples don’t last though, they’re really nothing more than an echo, slowly receding, growing weaker as they roll farther away from the source. What I want to create is a fucking Tsunami to wash across every dry, parched piece of earth, drowning everything crispy and crunchy in my path; some kind of reckless softening." ~MDD


"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred." ~ Winnie the Pooh


"I'm sure the red fern has grown and has completely covered the two little mounds. I know it is still there, hiding its secret beneath those long, red leaves, but it wouldn't be hidden from me for part of my life is buried there too. Yes, I know it is still there, for in my heart I believe the legend of the sacred red fern." ~ Wilson Rawls


"This is what the womb of the sea has taught me. Those who have seen the truth will always be inconsolable. Only he who has never been in danger is really saved. A ship might even appear, now, on the horizon, and speed here on the waves to arrive a second before death and take us away, and have us return alive, alive-but this would not save us, really. Even if we ever found ourselves ashore somewhere again, we shall never again be saved. And what we have seen will remain in our eyes, what we have done will remain on our hands, what we have felt will remain in our souls. And forever, we who have known the truth, forever, we the children of horror, forever, we the veterans of the womb of the sea, forever, we the wise and the sagacious, forever - we shall be inconsolable.
Inconsolable.
Inconsolable." ~ Alessandro Baricco


"Lights go out and I can’t be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
Have bought me down upon my knees
Oh I beg, I beg and plead
Singing
Come out of things unsaid
Shoot an apple off my head
And a trouble that can’t be named
A tiger’s waiting to be tamed" ~ Coldplay

"Muddy water, let stand becomes clear." ~ Lao Tzu

"I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the waiting had begun
And headed straight into the shining sun." ~ Pink Floyd


"This time was good. Next time will be better." ~ Little Tree's grandparents

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy." ~ Anne Frank

"I am Jack's smirking revenge." ~ Fight Club

"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them." ~ John Updike

"Wholloping WindSnappers! It IS a Rhino!"
"Now if I were a rhino, where would i hide?" ~ from Spiderman (the TV cartoon)

"Every day, God gives us the sun—and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist—that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem to be the same to us. But that moment exists—a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles."
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, Paulo Coelho.

Sometimes the things you can’t change end up changing you.
~the air I breathe

"Water slipping toward water, a most delicate courtship, the bends on the river like a lullaby of the soul. An imperceptible journey. "
~Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco

"From the state of the Uncarved Block comes the ability to enjoy the simple and the quiet, the natural and the plain. Along with that comes the ability to do things spontaneously and have them work, odd as that may appear to others at times."
~The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff

They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.
~Dorothy Parker

"The things we forget may as well never have happened, but she had many memories, both real and illusory, and that was like living twice."
Isabel Allende, Daugher of Fortune

"She entered the place of her dreams along a much traveled path and returned treading very carefully in order not to shatter the tenuous visions against the harsh light of consciousness."
~Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende

“In too deep and lost in time
Why'd you have to go and let it die?
Beautiful veins and bloodshot eyes
Why'd you have to go and let it die?

Hearts gone cold and hands were tied.
Why'd you have to go and let it die?”
~ Foo Fighters, Let it Die

”Silence swimming in a pool of dreams
beneath its depths the forgotten streams
above, the city of the evening star
behind its walls, the grand bazaar
as she walks through its endless maze
cursing those who mistrust her ways
please my friend no matter what she sees
tell my lover come back to me

doorways spilling out their sombre light
casting shadows that will raid the night
along the alleys of her ruling fears
walk the visions that will cause her tears
lying still as she wills her glance
through the eyes of a charmers trance
please my friend no matter what she sees
tell my lover come back to me

and on the walls
shadows play
twilight souls
anguished ways
lost adrift
severed seas
i await you
come to me
~Tea Party, The Bazaar


“I’m going back, or, rather, part of me is going back to that world where only what we can see, touch, and explain makes sense. I want to go back to the world of speeding tickets, people arguing with bank cashiers, eternal complaints about the weather, to horror films, and Formula 1 racing. This is the universe I’ll have to live with for the rest of my days. I’ll get married, have children, and the past will become a distant memory, which will, in the end, make me ask myself: How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so ingenuous?
I also know that, at night, another part of me will be wandering in space, in contact with things as real as the pack of cigarettes and glass of gin before me now. My soul will dance with her soul; I’ll be with her while I sleep; I’ll wake up sweating and go into the kitchen for a glass of water. I’ll understand that, in order to combat ghosts you must use weapons that form no part of reality. Then following the advice of my grandmother, I’ll place an open pair of scissors on my bedside table to snip off the end of the dream.
The next day, I’ll look at the scissors with a touch of regret, but I must adapt to living in the world again or risk going mad.
~ Page 7, The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho

“Whoever drinks this water once can never quench her thirst at other springs.”
~ Page 178, The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho

‘It really is very strange that as soon as you decided to become a God-fearing man, your life should immediately have taken such a turn for the worse. I wouldn’t want to weaken your faith, but, despite your firm belief in the spiritual world, nothing in your life has improved.’

The blacksmith did not reply at once; he had often thought the same thing himself, unable to understand what was happening in his life.

He wanted to give his friend an answer, however, and so he began to talk and ended up finding the explanation he was seeking. This is what the blacksmith said:

‘The unworked steel arrives in my workshop and I have to make swords out of it. Do you know how that is done? First, I heat the metal until it is red-hot, then I beat it mercilessly with my heaviest hammer until the metal takes on the form I need. Then I plunge it into a bucket of cold water and the whole workshop is filled with the roar of steam, while the metal sizzles and crackles in response to the sudden change in temperature. I have to keep repeating that process until the sword is perfect: once is not enough.’

The blacksmith paused for a long time, lit a cigarette, then went on:

‘Sometimes the steel I get simply can’t withstand such treatment. The heat, the hammer blows, the cold water cause it to crack. And I know that I will never be able to make it into a good sword blade. Then I throw it on the pile of scrap metal that you saw at the entrance to the workshop.’

Another long pause, then the blacksmith concluded:

‘I know that God is putting me through the fire of afflictions. I have accepted the blows that life deals out to me, and sometimes I feel as cold and indifferent as the water that inflicts such pain on the steel. But my one prayer is this: Please, God, do not give up until I have taken on the shape that You wish for me. Do this by whatever means You think best, for as long as You like, but never ever throw me on the scrap heap of souls.’
~Page, 220, The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho