Soon the sleet turned to snow and became beautiful, and everything suddenly felt more important and meaningful.

I had no idea what to do with myself. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to dispose of my body in space and time, every minute of every day, for the rest of my life.

My own perceptions were no longer enough to constitute the physical world for me. Every sound, every syllable that reached me, I wanted to filter through his consciousness.

An elixir of love—what an idea. You loved that one, the one who didn't love you, so what good was an elixir that turned her into someone else?

"Right," I said. I couldn't imagine viewing Bill's presence on Earth as any kind of a miracle, but wasn't that itself the miracle--that love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?

I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.

We find a way to express our distress through imitation, until, eventually, we “have ‘learned’ or—better—‘acquired’ a new psychic state.”

But he also sensed that any story that resolved his problems too completely was untrue, an evasion of the unknown.

“I have survived the darker aspects of myself” (quoted from book written by Naomi)

Unless they were unreliable or clearly established as lunatics or scoundrels, characters in novels, movies, and games were meant to be taken at face value—the totality of what they did or what they said.

But people—the ordinary, the decent and basically honest—couldn't get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

—he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

“The game character, like the self, is contextual.”

I didn’t know how else to leave.

Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.

It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

“And when the last rocket burst and the cheering died away the night that had been fine before seemed dull and heavy in contrast, the sky became a pall.”

“I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and fully built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.”

“It was ours, inviolate, a fraction of time suspended between two seconds.”

“Or possibly I was none of these things, but a trespasser in time.”

“People like you… stubborn and stupid and drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them.”

“—and relearning the beat to her own heart.”

“Like many parents in middle age, he’s quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts it his own perspective.”

“If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.”

“That I was a success is not apparent now, that I would be a success was not apparent then.”

“Can any telling ever be so thorough that there is no more story left to tell?”

“Symbols, or their absence, do not always mean what they seem to symbolize.

Nevertheless, I suppose they always symbolize something.”

“(This, I am reminded, is why I love walking in the city, taking to the streets in pursuit of some spontaneous and near-arbitrary objective.) If one knocks oneself out of one’s routine – and in so doing knocks others gently out of theirs – then one can now and again create these momentary opportunities to be better than one is.”

“Sympathy is offered in the soft downturn of glances.”

“He looks around to seek help, but his predicament remains his own.”

“—the mind designs the body”

“I managed to maintain on the surface a smile which never deserted my lips; this was the accommodation I offered to others, a most precarious achievement performed by me only at the cost of excruciating efforts within.”

“She too seems to be weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being…”

“I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plans lol to stave off my descent.”

“I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person‘s heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity.”

“I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.“

“He struck me as a reptilian, small–hearted being, someone placed on the planet to strike a chord with similar people, people who distracted themselves with money and conversation rather than sink their hands and teeth into the world around them.”

“There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”

“There we stood in the cold, damp room, in the frosty vacuum prevailing at this dull, gray time of night, and it crossed my mind that the thing that leaves the body sucks a piece of the world after it, and no matter how good or bad it was, how guilty or blameless, it leaves behind a great big void.”

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves…And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has her own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”

“It was as if I was pulling a cart loaded down with all that baggage as well as the weight of wasted time.”

“I didn’t dwell on death because I was excited by life.”

“I’ve witnessed many events, I’ve amassed a lot of experience, but either because I was distracted or too busy, I haven’t acquired much wisdom.”

“Time became a constant itch.”

“Icy spores of anxiety colonized her mind and reduced it to a wasteland of fear.”

“She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.”

“As if the words had to jettison their meaning to make the trip from the page to my eyes.

“Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part.”

“It’s a sad feeling, wanting to be part of a strange, new world, while looking at it from a distance, watching those who’ve conquered it walk with high shoulders.”

“Only with him did I come to realize how much noise there is in the world, and how marvelous it is not to be a part of it.”

“There aren’t words vast or specific enough to capture the ecstacy and the ache and love and fear I feel just looking at him now.”

“The thought was disquieting – that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.”

“Even in a hotel for the dead, life gave me scraps.”

“Embrace possibility, but don’t let it drag you down.”

“It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance.”

“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quality. That’s why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.”

“Sometimes people call it a disorder, but I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy so I don’t go in on that dime-store wordage.”

“I rarely worry about the facts, only about the reality that my imagination and I chose to see.”

“…and our eternally impending lending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”

“He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sign, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion.”

“The problem, though, with trying to be the idea anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context.”

“…and how I hadn’t grown out of those traits but had instead grown into them, so that these qualities had not kept me from becoming someone else but had in fact become who I was.”

“There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.”

“The things that look fixed in the world, child – mountains, wealth, empires – their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.”

“Why can’t healing happen as fast as wounding?”

“To defend oneself against fear is simply to ensure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.”

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”

“Much of your joy is lost in the need to hold it, intact, so you try to dull that voice which needs clarity, taking another sip.”

“Think of this: she closes her eyes and pries open your chest, one rib at a time – she knows what to do, she doesn’t need to see – slipping her sentences next to your beating heart, the small bundle of muscle swelling beneath her hand. A symptom of something which could only be known as joy.”

“It’s one thing to be looked at, another to be seen; you’re scared that she might not just see your beauty, but your ugly too.”

“Your hearts were joined, beating in unison, but then were fractured, blood pooling and spilling in the darkness, and then they broke and that was that really.”

“A strange time came for Raskolnikov: it was as if a fog suddenly fell around him and confined him in a hopeless and heavy solitude.”

“And from all of these pages upon pages, one thing I have learned is that there is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing. Because to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as we have experienced it.”

“Hold it. Stop. Don’t I regret losing this crummy world? Aren’t I sad to lose life’s everyday defeats, its failed loves, its eternal fear of the unknown?”

“I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand.”

“I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.”

“You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.”

“In that way of his, he has understood the knot of things I cannot say, and he reminds me that I am home.”

“But it’s never starting over, Cindy, Its just continuing on.”

“Be that as it may, we can’t go back in time, everything we undertake is irrevocable, and if we look back what we see is not life but death.”

“They observed solidarity, equality, and consideration towards others in their language and spread a kind of net over reality, which continued on its unjust and discriminating path below them.”

“It was the same here, the inner experience, which made everything glow with meaning, had no counterpart on the outside.”

“…deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me.”

“Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became.”

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”

“It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and striking out a course from inner impulse, would look the same in results.”

“…but love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.”

“…the romance of growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.”

“And ‘the girl behind the café counter’ became, more usefully, the pronoun you in the same way that many small details are not necessary but can become everything.”

“It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”

“And talking about characters in books is exciting and soothing to me at the same time.”

“At some level invisible to the human eye, opposites blended in the most unexpected ways.”

“The world meant something else to them than it did to me.”

“You could kill yourself real slow and feel like a million dollars.”

“She lives there with her creatures in the miniscule architecture of imagination, so much richer than the offerings of full sized life.”

“All its profligate twigs click in the breeze as if this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by branches that wave their semaphores against the bluest of midwestern winter skies.”

“She pulled the thread of memory tentatively towards herself and began gently looking at all the pictures her mind had tied to it.”

“Things changed again after that, change being the one constant.”

“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’ve been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”

“My being has many facets.”

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives – or to find strength in a very long one.”

“Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.”

“…the total absence of familiarity can make a place seem alien and unconquerable, and you turn your attention and curiosity away from it to avoid getting frustrated.”

“Around us the foliage alternatively thickened and thinned, so that sometimes we were in darkness, and utter cocoon of green and black, and sometimes we were in landscape that resembled a meadow, with vast, empyreal sweeps of feathery yellow bushes and only a few slender trees, their boughs extravagantly trimmed with ruffled drapes of leaves.”

“Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes courage.”

“Decorative gestures add romance to life.”

“And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.”

“Out of a persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.”

“What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.”

“In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion.”

“I’d been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness.”

“She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me.”

“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”

“Then you must trust in her. And even if she is single minded to a fault, you must trust that life will find her in time. For eventually it finds us all.”

“The designs of men are notoriously subservient to happenstance, hesitation, and haste.”

“Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for connection.”

“Friendship was so weird. People spent so much time talking about falling in love, but making friends was just as hard – if you thought about it, it was crazy: Here, meet some total strangers, tell them all your secrets, expect no hurt or humiliation to come from it.”

“The only trick was knowing that your past was never the same twice, and the past was never the same for two people.”

“Being an adult was always growing new layers of skin, trying to fool yourself that the bones underneath were different too.”

“It’s always possible to fail to know the people closest to us.”

“A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive on a continuum from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: They take on a kind of human vitality.”

“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”

“Every so often the turmoil of life quieted down.”

“Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.”

“A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depend on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive.”

“That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.”

“Other objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.”

“In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment.

In fact, they serve only to make it clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”

“But maybe that’s where love grows best – in the deep space that exists between polarities.”

“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other…wickedness went deeper than skin color.”

“I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us.”

“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”

“Too much joy, I swear, I’d lost in our desperation to keep it.”

“I miss you more than I remember you.”

“…for there are some who exhaust themselves learning and investigating things that, once learned and investigated, do not matter in the slightest to the understanding or the memory.”

“But by accident, not by cunning calculation books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.”

“But the force of the hymn acknowledges that we all achieve a touch of innocence in our simple gratitude for any alleviation for our condition.”

“Time is really one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out the pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that times is our size, but really it goes on and on.”

“For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history.”

“Once the bird was out of sight, the silence flowed back in, a viscous fluid filling every opening.”

“Such a thin veil separated the past from the present. They existed simultaneously in the human heart. Anything could transport you.”

“He had thought that being with her would make him feel less lonely, but it only gave his loneliness a new stubborn quality, like it was planted down inside him and impossible to kill.”

“It’s like something he assumed was just a painted background all his life has revealed itself to be real.”

“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”

“I was free. Every day, when you’re on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.”

“He raised the palms of his hands to stop Prabaker’s wheedling cajolery. They were huge hands, gnarled and calloused enough to scrape the barnacles off the side of a dry-docked oil tanker.”

“The facts of life are very simple. In the beginning we feared everything – animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky – everything except eachother. Now we fear eachother and almost nothing else.”

“My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soil has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled.”

“But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.”

“Fate’s way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed.”

“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.”

“If you make your heart a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.”

“Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities.”

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain’t the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make a machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

“The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.”

“And so these parties divided upon that midnight plane, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys.”

“Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

“The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was not.”

“It’s becoming too precious. Too important. To care for anything deeply is to invite disaster.”

“Funny how words echoed now, where before they sounded right, her voice for her ears.”

“You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they’ve been read…”

“‘And there is no mystery to it,’ says the kaumatua sadly. ‘It is horrifyingly easy to make people perform as you wish, if they think they’re in control all the time.’”

“Among themselves, doves fight as often as hawks.”

“Illogical behavior to fill an emptiness would not fulfill much more. How much do you trade to defeat lonesomeness.”

“She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.”

“And he realized, then, how silly it seemed that you could ever know another person – really know her – and how silly it was to think that he had any idea what it was to be like her, day after day.”

“She returned the expression with a horrifying uninhabited grin, the kind you couldn’t help but make when someone came to pick you up at the airport and you saw them there, in the sea of transient strangers, a familiar face that had arrived at that particular spot on earth just for you.”

“Life’s insistence on juxtaposing darkness and light would never cease to amaze him.”

“Maybe another person couldn’t irrevocably save you, but they could sometimes calm you down, and that felt like an exquisitely magical thing.”

“…of how the past could not be separated from memory, of how it was not only time that changed people, it was memory as well.”

“In prison, however, where everything was ordered by time, but time itself was always elusive, out of reach, he realized that he had been wrong about books.”

“Words, he thought, they betray you.”

“But words remained dangerous, elusive; he couldn’t move them in the direction of his ideas and notions.”

(RLKE letters to a young poet) "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

“The pounding of ‘what do I want’ went still in her breast. It didn’t matter what she chose. The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction. Creatures lied and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord.”

“But he would have been wrong. Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life under foot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”

“And you will not have lost him to cancer or to the cruelty of another’s actions; you will have lost them to the abyss of their own soul, and you will be afraid that maybe their surrender to that abyss is, after all, the only act that makes sense.”

“You will have to live in this world and either hate it or make peace with it, because it is the only world you have available to live in.”

“But it’s still love. Animals, people. It’s unconditional, and it’s both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.”

“And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.”

“After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.”

“Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: what makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”

“Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one’s life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had.”

“One is simply accepting the inescapable truth: that the likes of you and I will never be in a position to comprehend the great affairs of today’s world and or best course will always be to put our trust in an employer we judge to be wise and honorable, and to devote our energies to the task of serving him to the best of our ability.”

“All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that.”

“Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.”

“Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them.”

"'So?’

‘So?’ Yossarian was puzzled by Doc Daneeka’s inability to comprehend. ‘Don’t you see what that means? Now you can take me off combat duty and send me home. They’re not going to send a crazy man to get killed, are they?’

‘Who else will go?’”

“Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was going to lose.”

“Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime and to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.”

“And from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.”

“The town was peopled with sleepwalkers, whose trance was broken only on the rare occasions when at night their wounds, to all appearance closed, suddenly reopened.”

“For to really think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything – by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s check, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live. And these people know it only too well.”

“But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little, or, rather, that love was never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she- or he- would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.”

“And to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”