Monday Quotes

1. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
--Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

2. Nostalgia of any kind isn't a longing for the time, it's a longing for the person you were, the place you held, and the people who were around you. That has changed, but it was going to change anyway. It always does. --Katharine Pilkington

3. The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in slience, but restraint. --Marianne Moore

4. Life is short and the art is long. Experience is fleeting, experiment treacherous, and judgement difficult. --Hippocrates

5. Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians. --Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

Tuesday quotes

1. How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you being to understand there is no going back. There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep...and take hold. --J.R. Tolkien


2. He who cannot draw on the three thousand years is living from hand to mouth. --Goethe


3. What she wanted from them was sympathy -- because she still felt, or at least feared, that Ivan was a good man and she had lost a prize. But if he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him? Is it my pride that's wounded?


Maybe. But she still knew, deep in her heart, that this was not true, either. Because if Ivan came back to her, even now, she would go to him. She wouldn't trust him, but she would take him back. Because she really did love him. And love doesn't dissapear just because of the vile unworthiness of the loved one.


She had always thought Ivan was the kind of man who kept a promise.


--Orson Scott Card, in Enchantment


4. Life is a great big canvas. Throw all the paint on it you can. --Danny Kaye


5. Seek the lofty by reading, hearing, and seeing great work at some moment every day. --Thomas Wilder

"The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao" by Orson Scott Card

When I was a child, I thought
a god was dissapointed
whenever some distraction
interrupted my tracing of the lines
revealed in the grain of wood.
Now I know the gods expect
such interruptions,
for they know our frailty.
It is completion that surprises them.

When I follow the path of the gods
through the wood,
My eyes take every twisting
turn of the grain,
But my body moves, straight
along the planking,
So those who watch me see
that the path of the gods is straight
While I dwell in a world with
no straightness in it.

--Orson Scott Card