There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words — “Wait and hope”.
We live in time – it holds us and molds us – but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
This is love, she thought, isn’t it? When you notice someone’s absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.
Now and then I pace my place I can’t retrace how I got here. I cheat the light to check my face, it’s slightly harder than last year. And all at once it gets hard to take, it gets hard to fake what I won’t be. Cause one of these days I’ll be born and raised.
As a kid, I would count backwards from ten and imagine at one, there would be an explosion–perhaps caused by a rogue planet crashing into Earth or some other major catastrophe. When nothing happened, I’d feel relieved and at the same time, a little disappointed. I think of you at ten; the first time I saw you. Your smile at nine and how it lit up something inside me I had thought long dead. Your lips at eight pressed against mine and at seven, your warm breath in my ear and your hands everywhere. You tell me you love me at six and at five we have our first real fight. At four we have our second and three, our third. At two you tell me you can’t go on any longer and then at one, you ask me to stay. And I am relieved, so relieved–and a little disappointed.
Most people want to save the entire world. It’s a lovely thought, and I’m not saying it’s not a noble pursuit – but it’s impossible to save everyone. You just have to pick your little corner of the world and focus your energy there. That’s the only way you will ever make a difference
Love cannot be measured by how long you wait. It’s about how well you understand why you are waiting.
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
All the people we have met and all the people we have yet to meet, are meant to exist so we can find them, so we both could exchange a set of directions which will guide us to the next place we are meant to go. And as we go we must always believe that maybe this could be our last stop. That maybe the next person we meet will not have a set of directions. That maybe they will have more and that maybe they will offer us something beautiful enough to inspire us to stay.
In French, you don’t really say “I miss you”. You say “tu me manques”, which is closer to “you are missing from me”.
I love that. “You are missing from me”. You are a part of me, you are essential to my being. You are like a limb, or an organ, or blood. I cannot function without you.
And I understand. I understand why people hold hands: I’d always thought it was about possessiveness, saying ‘This is mine’. But it’s about maintaining contact. It is about speaking without words. It is about I want you with me and don’t go.
She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.