time waits for no one...

“For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one. Happiness is a journey, not a destination...”

-Souza

all that matters...

"There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters..."

-from Neil Gaiman's "The Books of Magic"

"I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane..."

-from Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere"

the farthest shore...

"Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed...
On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility."

-Ged, Archmage of Earthsea, from “The Farthest Shore” by Ursula K. Le Guin

the life i've lived...

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breath back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet.
That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed..."

-Tehanu from "The Other Wind" by Ursula K. Le Guin

whom, after all, am I...?

“When I was young I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leaped to the later like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again.
Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are...”

-Ged, Archmage of Earthsea, from “The Farthest Shore” by Ursula K. Le Guin

시월에... or another chance to get it right...

"I think I fell in love with her, a little bit. Isn't that dumb? But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you. I wanted to go with her. I wanted her to notice me. And then she stopped walking. Under the moon, she stopped. And looked at us. She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there.
But I'll always love her. All my life."

-Brant Tucker, in "World's End"

"Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you."

-Neil Gaiman

사랑했요...? or what's up with love...?

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...
You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love...”

-Rose Walker in "The Kindly Ones"

"Love belongs to desire, and desire is always cruel..."

the other side of the sky...

"Humans gaze up at "them" and proclaim admiration. Yet "they" might be cursing us. On the ground there are rocks for hiding and no need for the agony of continuously flapping wings..."

-Nicholas D. Wolfwood in "Trigun"

"The owl thinks slowly, but the owl thinks long..."

-from Ursula K. Le Guin's "Catwings"

"There is no such thing as a one-sided coin and there are two sides to every sky..."

no man is an island...

"There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With inidividual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themsleves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended cariacture of a human child?...

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book and resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her."

-from Neil Gaiman's "American Gods"

for whom the bell tolls...

"The past is the past and the future is the future. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. The present is the present. I am who I am and you are who you are. That's all there is to it. Does it really matter? Or do we just think it does?"

-Faye Valentine in "Cowboy Bebop" (カウボーイビバップ) by Watanabe Shin'ichirō (渡辺 信一郎)

nothing...

"All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing."

"Nothing is done entirely for nothing," said the fox of dreams. "Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on."

-the fox and the fox of dreams in Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman, The Dream Hunters"

"Even nothing cannot last forever..."

the lives we build...

"Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all..."
He thought this the most profound statement of the human condition he had ever heard...

If he had known how, he would have said: "I looked at what he built, and to me it explained the stars..."

-from "The Drawing of the Three"

how did it get so late, so soon...?

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened..."

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind..."

“How did it get so late, so soon?
It's night before its afternoon.
December is here before it's June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late, so soon...?”

-Theodor Geisel, a.k.a Dr Seuss

fairy tales...

"Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten..."

-G.K. Chesterton

"Here is the beginning of the end of our dreams..."

a song...

"Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn't a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead..."

"Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs..."

—from Neil Gaiman's "Anansi Boys"

someone...

"I could not help but feel that there was someone out there waiting for me... my other half..."

"I never understood why you seemed so perfect to me..."

"I unconsciously relied on you..."

"It was humiliating, cathartic, beautiful and it just might have saved my life..."

-an infinitely original author of charming sensibility...

unlikely...

"Sometimes I wish she didn't call later on that night. That the final goodbye was right there at the blue line stop. And we never saw each other or spoke again. It was like being in a movie, too perfect...

-from Jeffrey Brown's "Little Things"

little things...

"I wonder why we hold onto things we don't really need anymore...?"

"I don't think you ever really move on from someone... you just make more room in your heart for new people..."

"Why is everyone, everywhere so in love...?"

"It is a hard world for little things..."

-from Jeffrey Brown's "Little Things"

have you seen the horizon lately...?

"Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the earth was made round so that we could not see too far down the road..."

"I'm with you because I choose to be with you. I don't want to live someone else's idea of how to live. Don't ask me to do that. I don't want to find out one day that I'm at the end of someone else's life..."

-from "Out of Africa"

looking for magic...

"Sometimes I look at this world and it moves me to tears.
The joy and terror and the mad drama of it all.
And I wonder why they never seem to really see it?
Maybe one lifetime just isn't enough.
Or maybe it's too much. I can't say.
But the truth, to be perfectly plain, is that people
are looking for magic in all the wrong places..."

-The Lady Kildare, from Brian Holguin's "Aria"

waiting for my real life to begin...

"Don't stress. We all live in our own ways. And we all have doubts about whether it's right or wrong. But there isn't a right or wrong way to live..."

"...you've probably realised that happiness never lasts. That fleetingness is why we have to cherish each and every day..."

"Living sucks. And yet, I still want to live..."

-from "What a Wonderful World!" (素晴らしい世界, Subarashii Sekai) by Asano Inio (浅野 いにお)

what becomes of snow...?

The world continues to turn. The sun rises and sets - as it has a habit of doing :). Days come and days go, and life goes on as it must... Yet every now and then, it has a way of surprising you and decides to reveal something altogether unlooked for, in common hours... this is the world I woke up to and the thoughts that came unbidden...
I've always thought the world divided by how one chooses to answer the question. The proverbial glass half-empty or glass half-full. I've yet to meet a person who knew the answer without first knowing the question. I'd like to think that someday I will.
So I ask you, what does snow turn into when it melts...?

wherever you go, there you are...

"Who rides the wind, must go where their steed will take them.
Who treads the way of stars, must walk in silence..."

-Rose and Queen Titannia of Faerie from Neil Gaiman's "Books of Magic"

other worlds...

"This is a town which keeps its secrets well, and you are the one who tells its secret tales..."

-from "Whisper of the Heart/If You Listen Closely" (耳をすませば, Mimi wo sumaseba) by Kondō Yoshifumi (近藤 喜文)

"Of course I believe other worlds exist. If they didn't, life wouldn't be interesting. It is a lot like love: you can't see it but it exists – simply because you believe it. It's just a matter of believing..."

-Miyazaki Hayao (宮崎 駿)

a beginning for fragile things...

"I think... that I would rather recollect a life mis-spent on fragile things, than spent avoiding moral debt..."

-from Neil Gaiman's introduction to "Fragile Things"

regrets...

“I lay on the snow, looking up at the stars, and I could feel the earth turning beneath me. If you listened carefully, you could hear the groan and creak of pulley and rope, turning the earth and all the life that clings to it. In a single, vertigo heartbeat, it felt like I might slip off entirely and free-fall into nothingness.”
.....

“I knew a girl once. Her name, her name is not important now. She came to Japan from home and we spent our brief time together exploring Japanese cityscapes and countrysides. We hiked up a mountain in Gifu. Wandered the myriad streets of Tokyo. Snowboarded down pristine slopes in Nagano. We spent nights like this talking into the early morning. She drank a lot of beer and I listened to her stories. And then I awoke and made my way back to my real life. I left and she stayed, and that is pretty much where the story ends.

Sometimes I hate Japan. Or perhaps hate is too strong a word. But it has such a hold over me. Casts such a spell on my existence. And sometimes I fear that I have fallen off the earth. Maybe when people fall off the earth, it is into this half-life of quiet desperation that they land. Forever separated from the magic just over the horizon like a dream upon waking.

It was not that I was lovesick or heartbroken. It was just that on nights like this, under a full sky of stars, listening to the snow fall silently on empty slopes, on nights like this the mind turns naturally to a girl with dark hair and a warm smile. At night, when I dream, she is always laughing and turning into the sunlight. And I wake, feeling like a kite returning to earth because the wind on which it was sailing has passed.

A moon, half-empty, had possession of the sky. Distant stars like islands near at hand. I lay there almost till dawn, on a Japanese slope, turning the image of her over and over in my mind, like you might with a stone in your hand. The edges blur and the features rub away, until all you are left with are scattered recollections and a vague sense of loss. Not feelings, but the memory of feelings. Longing. Nostalgia. Regrets so sharp they make your chest hurt.”

-paraphrased in part from Will Ferguson's "Hokkaido Highway Blues". Where he ends and I begin, I will leave it up to you....

the road home...

"I am a turtle. My home’s on my back. And yet I feel that the most real home I’ll ever have is in the space where our roads merged and traveled along together... for a time."

-from Craig Thompson's "Good-bye, Chunky Rice"

castles in the air...

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them."

-Henry David Thoreau

the sky is so blue...

"The sky is so blue. The sun is high and the sea is wide. Stop worrying. Things happen in your life like they're supposed to."

-Kurumizawa Makoto from "Boys Be"

"It'll be what it'll be. Like everything in life..."

-Robert E. Reuben

"Welcome to the universe... big, isn't it?"

things worth knowing...

“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.”

-Rose Walker

the turning gate...

“All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.”

-Neil Gaiman

"Even though it is hard to be human, let us not become monsters..."

-from "The Turning Gate"