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

“As my father used to say: “Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.””

Page 55

This line made me chuckle but then reflect. Pretty good advice to live by in many a situations.

"Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The Mummy’s Nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer." – William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands

This hit hard. Forced to me think if I am living in the hopes of the past.

Book : Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“Fate rules. You follow the steps, and you plan and you work, then fate slips in laughing and makes fools of us. Sometimes we can trick it or outguess it, but most often it’s already written. For some, it’s written in blood. That doesn’t mean we stop, but it does mean we can’t always comfort ourselves with blame”

It's fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher than the other, that the set of the lid of your left eye is such that the eye is a fraction more open than the other. It is these things that make you both attractive and beautiful, whereas... otherwise you would be a statue. Symmetry is for God, not for us."'

• Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

The poor bloody poet can no longer say “ope” for “open,” or “swain” for “youth,” he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse.

You cannot always blame soldiers for their atrocities, because I can tell you from experience that they are the natural consequence of the inferno of relief that comes from not having to think anymore. Atrocities are sometimes nothing less than the vengeance of the tormented. Catharsis is the word I was looking for. A Greek word.'

• Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Lois de Bernières

“Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.”