You have been insulted, and you have been beaten...and yet you have refused to let any of it hurt you where it really mattered: on the inside. You are indeed a stone. You withstand the waves and winds of this world, and you remain strong.
If you are courageous, people say you are boastful or “too known”. You either choose to accept what they say to you and you need to accept it with its consequences. The consequence is that you will remain where you are!
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.
Of all that I have possessed in my life, my memories are the only things remaining to me. Indeed, I believe that memories are the only real treasure any human can hope to hold always.
Beauty fades, but the heart remains the same...Physical desire is a lie, Emele continued. It is not a bad thing, but it blinds a person and makes them unable to see truth. Falling in love is a matter of the heart, not of the exterior.
The stranger thought it might be God himself had forgotten much from our pasts, events far distant, events of the same day. And if a thing is not in God’s mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?
The May sunshine makes both the trolls and the elves disappear, he thought. They burst like soap bubbles. Only human beings remain, for a little while. We are a brief song beneath the sky, laughter in the wind that ends in a sigh. Then we too are gon...
Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
Art historians agree that Da Vinci's paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret... a secret that remains protected to this...
The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, o...
Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughing-stock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams are gone. That's the power of songs.
. She was breathing rarefied air, the ether you come upon at high altitudes. I understood finally how long-held grievances and petty smallnesses might get burned off, and pure creativity and humour remain.
...the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.
They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construc...
All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.
Hegel used to say that the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown. That’s why we don't know so much about stupidity.
Haven't we all, as time continues, found that we must be kind to ourselves and listen to our thoughts, because fewer and fewer of those remain who know what is most real to us?
It seemed perverse to some, but for all their apparent militarism the Gzilt had remained peaceful over many millenia; it was the avowedly peaceful Culture that had , within living memory, taken part in an all-out galactic war against another civilisa...
Her name was Ashley, but I called her Ash, because she looked like the burnt remains of a cigarette. But she smelled like coffee, and I thirsted for her affection.
