From House of Leaves by Mark Danieleswki

For me.. it might be this one from The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides.

Hit me like a punch to the gut.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow.”

And others say, “nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember the other is asleep at on your bed.

.

This is a radical dialectical perspective; two things can and do exist at once and the presence of one does not increase nor decrease the other; they both simply just are. It’s beautiful.

Foreword: But when it’s meant to be, the universe conspires to make it happen.

From Sloans Crossley’s “We All Want Impossible Things”

Such a beautiful commentary on a best friendship. I understand this entirely.

I just remembered 2 quotes for 2 very different books that hits the same, it’s on ‘waiting’; lately I’ve been feeling a lot of stuffs and idk maybe I’m somehow just waiting for it to pass idk One is from the book A thousand splendid suns by Khaled hosseini - . “Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.” . Another one is from conversations with friends by Sally Rooney and it goes like : (see image)

- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Tanith Lee's writing is so beautiful.

This quote always gives me goose bumps, and fills me with so much sadness. The idea that what it takes to hear God is to stop killing each other.

From Breakfast of Champions:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

"We will wage our battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons wherever it may take us. And one day, we will go home." - Optimus Prime, Transformers Exodus.

So I’ve recently met a man; our meeting was fated and so many things aligned for us to actually meet each other. We’ve had the best 3 weeks and I can truly seeing this working, but unfortunately he is from Australia and I met him travelling. He’s continuing on his travels while I’m going back home. Not really sure what will happen to us then but regardless I wanted to give him something to remember our time by. I am gifting him my favourite ever book “A Thousand splendid Suns”. I really want to write a meaningful quote in the book that perhaps represents our relationship in some way or maybe something inspiration for his future ventures. I would love to hear your ideas! Thank you

Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.

I noticed a pregnant girl sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper, and suddenly it occurred to me what a blessing it is to be ignorant. How could one possibly know all this and not miscarry?”

—Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

Untamed - Glennon Doyle

When you're beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise. Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that's what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder.'

- A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

"A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave."

She pointed to the steep cliffs along the shoreline.

"Jiko, mountain, same thing. The mountain is tall and will live a long time. Jiko is small and will not live much longer. That's all."'

- A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

🌟 Knowing who you are is powerful, but accepting yourself? That’s next-level. 💪✨ Evelyn Hugo’s words hit hard on how real strength comes from within.

What’s one thing you’ve learned about yourself lately? 👇

From somewhere, back in my youth, heard prof say, "Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again."

We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are all hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers as sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude, we all try to find out from a stranger whether or not we are related, we all use every long word that we know as often as we possibly can, we all go out for a long walk in the evening so that we can look over each others' fences, we all think that we are equal to the best. Do you understand?"'

- Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières