Sheroug

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

From “The Body” by Stephen King

“We’re used to events being portrayed in particular ways that when they actually happen to us, and our life bears no resemblance to expectation. We don’t really know how we’re supposed to respond. Our lives are unrecognizable to us. Should we still try to be happy, when everything seems so flawed and out of kilter and gray?”

“I hope that now, when I realize something is missing in my life, I will continue to search for it; even if I know that it may only be a promise, and not really there to be found at all. Otherwise we become men of straw, women of shadow, left standing in empty fields where not even the birds come; waiting for an endless summer, when winter is already here. Given how we live, so far from what was once true, its bewildering that we cope as well as we do. We dream our dreams to keep us sane, and also to keep us alive.”

From “The Straw Men” by Michael Marshall

“The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth”

“This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.”

From “Forever Odd” by Dean Koontz

“The sky is deep, the sky is dark. The light of stars is so damn stark. When I look up, I fill with fear. If all we have is what lies here, this lonely world, this troubled place, then cold stars and empty spaces…Well, I see no reason to persevere, no reason to laugh or shed a tear, no reason to sleep or ever to wake, no promises to keep, and none to make.”

From “The Book of Counted Sorrows” by Dean Koontz

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizzare and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

“You know, said Arthur, ‘it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young”

“Why, what did she tell you?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

From “The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams

“What if a demon were to creep after you one day or night, in your loneliest loneness, and say : “This life which you live and have lived, must be lived again by you, and innumerable times more. And there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh - everything unspeakably small and great in your life - must come again to you, and in the same sequence and series…”. Would you not throw yourself down and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment, in which you would answer him : “Thou art a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!”"

From “The Gay Science” by Frederick Nietzsche (I’ve only read an excerpt from this book. But I just had to share the quote, it’s rather refreshing)

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

From “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens

” ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, where every wish has been granted as a result of some evil turn of fate. The old couple who came into possession of the paw wished for a hundred dollars and received it as a gift of condolence when their only son was killed in nasty mill accident. The the mother had wished for the son to return to them. They had heard footsteps dragging up their walk shortly afterwards; then pounding on the door; a perfect fusillade of blows. The mother, mad with joy, has gone rushing down the stairs to let in her only child. The father, mad with quite another emotion, scrabbled through the darkness for the dried paw, found it at last, and wished his son dead again. The mother threw the door open a moment later and found nothing on the stoop but an eddy of night wind.”

From “Apt Pupil” by Stephen King

“So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else’s. Well, what are you? That’s the crux of the matter. Let’s try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? –No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity–in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now look. You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your conscious has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life.–Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? This will be you–the you that enters the future and becomes part of it.”

“About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something which has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it seems to me it’s just the contrary.
Often it is something you paid no attention to at the time–a vague thought that you didn’t bother to think out to the end, words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed–these are the things which return at night, clothed in flesh and blood as characters in dreams, as if to force you to make up for having neglected them in your waking hours.”

“Children are more honest, they aren’t frightened of the truth, but we are so afraid of seeming to be behind the times that we are ready to betray what is most dear to us, and praise what repels us, and say yes to what we don’t understand.”

From “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak

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