Strictly speaking, the Catholic Church has still not publicly accepted the Copernican theory. You are like them. You are afraid of having to shed the armor with which you have long defended yourself.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
I’m tired of living in hatred and resentment. I’m tired of living unable to love anyone. I don’t have a single friend—*not one*. And, worst of all, I can’t even love myself. Why is that? Why can’t I love myself? It’s because I can’t love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I’m saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Any person who lies awake at night worrying about the private pleasures of other consenting adults has more than just too much time on his hands; he has some unjustifiable beliefs about the nature of right and wrong.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith
The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Something’s wrong with the world, or something’s wrong with me: one or the other. The bottle and the cap don’t fit: is the problem with the bottle or the cap?
Haruki Murakami, IQ84
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.
Haruki Murakami, IQ84
That so many of us are still dying on account of ancient myths is as bewildering as it is horrible, and our own attachment to these myths, whether moderate or extreme, has kept us silent in the face of developments that could ultimately destroy us.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith
Little Bird (Unfinished)
it’s okay, little bird
that you clipped your wing
we’re all wounded
you just made it your thing
So little bird,
my mating dance, hence:
we’re given this life,
our only chance
Picnic yellow
in the bluff
I heard you flutter
before you fluffed
God what a sight
begonia rose cast,
short shorts and a
smile whose impression just lasts
there’s no love at first sight
but there is premonition
when I saw your face
the key turned in the ignition
My head was swollen
and I forgot my heart
it took years and distance
but that engine did start
‘every love story is a ghost story’
is something I read
but David’s last work
never got in my head
the words failed to mean;
they’re just sounds amiss
until I passed that bench
where you stopped me to kiss
Little bird be well
you’ll fly once more
this grounding is fated
so you may soar
beware of the updrafts
from locomotions that smoke
they’ll draw you in
and then you will choke
the same goes for towers
with deceiving height,
the falcons they come
but they claw they don’t bite
The world sees the special relationship, whether romantic or otherwise, as the only valid context for such an experience. That is our primary neurosis, our most painful delusion. We keep looking to the body for love, but it is not there. We embark upon an endless search for what we cannot find—one person, one circumstance that holds the key to Heaven. But Heaven is within us. It has nothing ultimately to do with the thoughts of someone else, and everything to do with what we choose to think ourselves. Not about one person, but about all people. So forgiveness of mankind, of everyone in every circumstance, is our ticket to Heaven, our only way home.
Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
We are not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’re not extending in the present.
Marianne Wiliamson, A Return to Love
We were drawn to the illusion of meaning. Sometimes someone who has nothing to offer in a real relationship can come on like they’re offering the world. They are so dissociated from their own feelings that they have become highly skilled performers, unconsciously playing whatever part our fantasies prescribe. But the responsibility for our pain still remains our own. If we hadn’t been looking for a cheap thrill, we wouldn’t have been vulnerable to the lie.
Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf