Thursday, June 14, 2007

Extracts From Books and Others

He expected love to make life complete and had never expected that a relationship might be two difficult people trying to become one.

She thought guiltily about how being in love made you so committed; you couldn’t go with other people for long period of time cause, you missed the person you loved and knowing he missed you made you feel like a rat.

There were so many things going on in her tone that he couldn’t begin to think about it. If her words were glass and shattered on the floor, in a hundred pieces, each one would be an emotion.

It was sad to be by yourself on a sentimental night like this, especially when there was a man you cared about. Cared about….a man you loved? She really did care a lot about him; she wanted to protect him and cuddle with him and be with him, but was that real love? Love should be your heart turning over when you saw him, a melting feeling when you had sex, being willing to die for him if you had to.

She trusted him completely. Yet there was something missing in him, spaces she couldn’t figure out.

When she called as he promised, she started to cry. She cried because he was so good and faithful and kind and she didn’t deserve him.

Out of breath trying to call out and finding no voice. He could never run fast enough. His legs would ache and he would ache and he would sink to the floor, drawn inexorably down like someone with wasting disease.

You will never have any life at all if you are always protecting yourself against some future disappointment. Life is risk. Loving somebody makes you vulnerable. That is the way it is. But it also makes you feel alive. If you don’t make commitments, you will miss half the fun. Commitments can be broken. And people can die. A lot of things can happen. But you can’t hide because the sky might fall down. After all, suppose the sky doesn’t fall down? What a waste, huh?

If was good to make sacrifices. Worldly pleasures only weighed you down on your difficult travels through life. (From the novel “Mazes and Monster” by Roma Jaffe)

I’m aware that on the periphery of life unexplained events and hidden disasters occurred.

My frivolity is recurring distress to my children. My seriousness equally perturbs them; revealing as it so often does, the moral failures of prejudice or eliticism or laten authoritarianism.

I find it hard to respond with suitable modesty.

Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather
I need solitude as I need food and rest. And like eating and resting, solitude is most healing when it fits the rhythm of your needs, a rigid schedule alones does not nourish me. Solitude is perhaps a misnomer. To me, being alone means together – the recoming together of myself and nature, of myself and being; the reuniting of self with all other selves. Solitude especially means putting the parts of my mind back together, unifying the pieces of self scattered by anger and fear, until I can once again see that the little things are little and big things are big.

Sands of Time by Sidney Sheldon
It was a voice filled with longing and desire, a voice that sang of loneliness and despair, of lost loves and dead dreams.

Striking rather than beautiful. Voluptuous, full lips, and dark knowing eyes. If her face fell just short of being beautiful, her body more than made up for it.

Body of a woman that moved with sensuous promise.

Crowds can make one lonely. I always feel like an island in a sea of people.

I promise to make it up to you if it takes me a lifetime. I know that the only place I can find my happiness is at your side.

For the sake of the rest of our lives together, I beg your forgiveness.

I was not running to God. I was running away from the world.


The difference between a patriot and a rebel depended on who was in power at the moment.


To my surprise she goes without demur.

This conventional gesture of courtesy gives an odd twist by her nakedness.

It occurs to me that he is gazing at me with a flattering air of intimacy.

You are the whispers in the late, late nights, you are symphony in my sunsets, you are splendor and glory of the dawning of my life.

I will be the same guy when you wake up and look at me.

Even when you knew that there had been no choice at all, the human psyche quails before the reality of unnecessary death and punishes the survivor for being alive when his victim is not.

There is too much disorder in my world for me to come to an end of my wishes and I’m left with a vague unease which lasts throughout lunch.

Once events occur, they’re no longer unacceptable.

Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks
Don’t count her love for you. You look upon yourself and see how much you love her. The amount you love her is how much she loves you even.

I’m nothing special. Of that I’m sure. I’m a common man with a common thought and I have led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to my name and my name will soon be forgotten. But I have always loved another with all my heart and soul and to me this has always been enough.

Lady on the Burning Deck by Catherine Heath
Against all my expectations.
I grow lonelier as I grow older. People die. Children grow up; friends become more absorbed in their own increasing difficulties. Nora has learnt early to trust to affection. I cannot adapt. I understand her contempt. I dislike her but respect her.

I’m crying with a grief for a lost past; for despised tradition; for a dead man no longer valued. If I’ve to choose between the man who made my rosewood table and Marlene I’ll not choose Marlene.

I’m shocked not at her impending death, but at my own failure to be shocked, at my self-absorption, at my own intellectual reconsideration of the truth of general confession.

I feel murder already done in my heart and it would be a pity to have guilt without the deed.

My anger dissipated, my fury no longer threatening to ignite my world.

I’m grateful, for answering services do not evoke dutiful reverence. They’re purely expedient.

The moments I felt otherwise are the dreams of last night, no longer even frightening enough to hold the quality of nightmare. I am awake: new problems face me.

Roger’s simplicity of heart is admirable but inconvenient.

She betrays no distress. Her smile does not flicker.

A daughter with superficial responses. A promiscuous young woman with no heart.

I will keep these fragile moments unbroken.

I cherish these moments of feminine gossip.

It takes sometime for me to understand Caroline’s plans for they seem so natural to her that she sees no need to explain them.

Life doesn’t work like that. I’m not something in the Kinsey Report, you know, or part of the registrar-general’s statistics. It’s not something you need to be clever about.

I’m momentarily silenced by the childishness of the response.

It is sad to see even the nices of our young people so cynical about society.

As long as they’re happy and don’t hurt anyone…that is all I ask.

We’ve learnt to recognize our defences.

The phrase trips readily to my tongue.

Has she not noticed his streak of vulgarity? Perhaps I bring it out in him.

…as if the emotional demands made on them by their relationship were just such that they could fulfill without fear.

The whirlpools of moral paradox confuse me, swirl me round and engulf me. Drown me.

Nobody but me seems to think that there might be some point, something worthwhile to be saved from the wreck of life. I shall grow old and dried-up and lonely, and the children will say it is my fault: the craze for self-sacrifice, this deliberate and neurotic withdrawal from life, this narrow distrust of sensuality. And then friends are not so easily to be cast off. Nor can relationships so easily be altered.

For no one, in our long decline, so dusty, spiteful and divided had quite such pleasant friend as mine, or loved them half as much I did.

From RD
The most common mistake unfaithful spouses make is to get caught up in the fantasy of a paramour who seems flawless. Affairs are based on illusion and wishful thinking. The unfaithful spouse has a romanticized version of his lover. They’re living in a kind of bubble. That bubble will inevitably burst if the affair replaces the marriage.

Runners don’t race other runners. They race against themselves; to conquer their wills, to transcend their weaknesses, to beat back their nightmares. And while a runner cannot actually beat himself, he can beat his time.

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.

I had the greatest difficulty in restraining my tears of triumph when I saw him so happy.

If you ask me to give you what you never gave me, my gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities.
Wanting to show your man your best side is only natural but giving him a chance to love the rest of you is what true love is all about. Your man should love you as you are and if he doesn’t, then that makes him the loser, not you.

It is better to have a broken heart now than nurse one forever.

There is something about spiritual people – an aura of peace.

I was by nature blind to the faults of elders. I’d learnt to carry out the orders of elders, not to scan their actions.

Man of truth must also be a man of care.
I was silenced but not comforted.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

Today well-lived makes every tomorrow a vision of hope and every yesterday a dream of happiness.

We didn’t make it this far because it was easy.
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon and men seem wise and brave which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.

A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences produces a slow, gradual day-by-day erosion of man’s emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

Beyond the Sky and the Earth
Here again is the mind, leaping from emotion to speech without reflection.

I don’t know where to draw line between cultural sensitivity and plain old cowardice.

There is an intensity about him that I find very attractive.

He is unsettlingly good-looking.

The burden of keeping silent is killing me

I want a love that lives in the plain light of day.


Snatches of Sentences
In curt but not menacing voice
Sexy in a trite-looking way
One vice for another
On my way back to you
Want to belong
Proffering invitation
I’m not at my brightest at this hour
Irritating interruption to routine
Greeted with a bland coldness

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