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"You choose to give up or make an effort. There are only these two choices for humans to choose from. You have to honestly tell them your feelings. The rest is up to them. To make an effort, or to give up would then be their choice. It was the same for you. It’s the same for everyone..."
"I'd been wondering whether there is any meaning to a failed love... Is something that disappeared the same as something that never existed? But after all this time, I know there is a meaning, there was a meaning right here... Because despite the heartbreak, I'm still glad that I fell in love with you..."
"There’s no way to stop what comes falling..."
-from "Honey and Clover (ハチミツとクローバー)" by Umino Chika (羽海野 チカ)
Akari Shinohara: Hey... They say its five centimeters per second.
Takaki Toono: What do you mean?
Akari Shinohara: The speed at which the sakura blossom petals fall...
Five centimeters per second...
"The things I had to tell her...
The things I hoped she would listen to...
There were so many of them..."
"At what speed must I live... to be able to see you again...?"
-from 5 Centimeters Per Second (秒速５センチメートル, Byōsoku Go Senchimētoru) by Shinkai Makoto (新海 誠)
"They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along..."
-from Neil Gaiman's "Anansi Boys"
"The world is not beautiful; and that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty..."
-from "Kino's Journey"
You should cry if you feel like it. If you have nothing to cry for, then you have nothing to live for as well...
-Hiko Kou from "Senkaiden Houshin Engi"
Maybe living itself is lonely. You come into the world alone, and you die alone...
-Kanzaki Kyoichi from "Boys Be"
The world's not perfect, but it's there for us trying the best it can. That's what makes it so damn beautiful...
-Roy Mustang from "Full Metal Alchemist"
"There are feelings you don't understand unless you get hurt and cause problems. And there are feelings you understand for the first time after falling to the bottom of life. You resist beautiful things, but after being beat up, you start to love beauty for the first time. Pain needs kindness, and for the darkness to stand out, it needs the sun. You can't make light of either of them. You can't say either of them are worthless..."
"Mingling with people, hurting them, getting hurt by them...that's how you learn about others, and about yourself..."
-from "Fruits Basket" (フルーツバスケット, Furūtsu Basuketto) by Takaya Natsuki (高屋 奈月)
"What we are, we choose to be..."
-Nuala, in "The Kindly Ones"
“"The devil made me do it..."
I have never made one of them do anything. They live their own lives. I do not live their lives for them...”
Lucifer, in "Season of Mists"
"We do what we must, Lucien. Sometimes we can choose the path we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all..."
-Dream, in "Season of Mists"
"I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind..."
Happy Birthday my friend...
-Neil Gaiman
Someone once told me that there were three "C's" to marriage. While I am sure that life is far more complicated than that, I like to believe that there are certain truths that should be simple. In this way, I think that I can agree with the sentiment which I would like to share with you now...
And so, for the first "C", I hope that through each other you may find "confirmation" for shooting stars and the moments of rare magic that are sometimes few and far between... but with whom you now have another to share them.
Secondly, may you also find "consolation" in times of trouble, and for the simple passing of beauty... Because the world is not perfect and life is sometimes hard. It is supposed to be. But now you have someone with whom to share the load and the moments in between that make it all the more worthwhile...
Lastly, may you find "joy"... now I know that it does not begin with a "C", but then life is full of surprises :). So I hope that each day forward may offer you both ever more moments to surprise and wonder... Congratulations my friend.
"If I never met you, I wouldn't like you. If I didn't like you, I wouldn't love you. If I didn't love you, I wouldn't miss you. But I did, I do and I will..."
-anon
"Sometimes it seems like we're all in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we hate ourselves. It's good to get dressed up once in a while. And admit the truth. That when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually... beautiful. Possibly even me."
-Angela's monologue from "My So-Called Life"
"I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything. What then...?"
"All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them..."
“But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize. Their hearts desire, their dream....But the price of getting what you want is getting what once you wanted...”
- Neil Gaiman
"...and even now on some long-forgotten paths... behind the sky... on the other side of the rain...
a language could be heard that sounded like the chatter of water over stones, and the sighing of wind amongst bare branches, and the crackle of fire consuming dead leaves...
there she stood and held a little box... the colour of heartache... wearing a gown of storms, shadows and rain, and a necklace of broken promises and regrets..."
"But now he had glimpsed the wrong side of something. He had the eeriest feeling - as if the world were growing older around him, and the best part of existence - laughter, love and innocence - were slipping irrevocably into the past..."
"This is to be mortal and to seek the things beyond mortality..."
-from Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel"
“Although time will pass and the day when everything will become a mere memory will come, I was there, you were there, everyone was there, looking for only one thing under those miraculous days. No matter when, it feels sweet and painful at the same time. It will remain in that distant place in my heart. Always feels nostalgic, always turning..."
"But I realized why I was lost. It's not because I don’t have a map. It's because I don’t have a destination...
–Takemoto Yuta from "Honey and Clover (ハチミツとクローバー)" by Umino Chika (羽海野 チカ)
"If you find someone who’s gone looking for himself before he can find anything he won’t be able to come home..."
"Survival of the fittest is the law of nature. We decieve or we are decieved. Thus, we flourish or perish. Nothing good ever happened to me when I trusted others. That is the lesson..."
"I tell ya, instead of being alone in a group, it's better to have real solitude all by yourself..."
You know the first rule of combat? Shoot them before they shoot you...
-Faye Valentine in "Cowboy Bebop"
"I hate stories like that. Man always thinks about the past before he dies, as if he were frantically searching for proof that he truly lived..."
-Jet Black in "Cowboy Bebop"
"Of the days that I have lived, only those I spent with you seemed real..."
-Vincent Volaju in "Cowboy Bebop: The Movie"
"So if I learned to read the stars, I'd maybe discover my future up there. It would solve a lot of problems..."
"And spoil a lot of mysteries."
"Better not to know?"
"Better to find out when the time is right. Everything to its Hour..."
"You're right of course..."
"Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and Now - in this bright, laughing moment - and let the Hours to come take care of themselves..."
"Do you think they get the joke?"
"I think today the whole world gets the joke..."
"Good answer."
-Candy Quackenbush and Malingo in "Abarat" by Clive Barker
"The view changes from where you are standing.
Words can wound, and wounds can heal.
All of these things are true..."
"Some of us claim that he was a messiah, and some think that he was just a man with very special powers. But that misses the point. Whatever he was, he changed the world..."
-from Neil Gaiman's "Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders"
"Um. What's the name of the word for things not being the same always. You know. I'm sure there is one. Isn't there? There must be a word for it ... the thing that lets you know time is happening. Is there a word?"
"Change..."
-Delirium and Dream, in "Sandman Volume 7: Brief Lives" by Neil Gaiman
"Lord, what was it the barbarian said, as the riders vanished?"
"Omnia mutantur, nihil interit... Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost..."
-Master Li and Dream, in "The Sandman Volume 10: The Wake" by Neil Gaiman
"People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes..."
"I walk across the dreaming sands under the pale moon: through the dreams of countries and cities, past dreams of places long gone and times beyond recall..."
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot..."
-from Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"
"It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety..."
-from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys
"Life is no play. We meet people once, and never see them again. There is no shape to events, no point at which we turn to the audience for phrase. No time at which we step behind the stage, to see the actors changing their wigs, and painting their faces, and muttering their lines..."
"But that is precisely where you are now. Welcome to my house...
-Will Shakespeare and Dream, in "The Sandman Volume 10: The Wake" by Neil Gaiman
"You are mortal: it is the mortal way. You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell.
You grieve. Then you continue with your life.
And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep.
But this will happen less and less as time goes on.
She is dead. You are alive.
So live..."
-Dream in Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"
...Flowers gathered in the morning,
Afternoon they blossom on;
Still are withered in the evening:
You can be me when I'm gone...
...All around me darkness gathers,
Fading is the sun that shone;
We must speak of other matters:
You can be me when I'm gone...
-the fortune cookie in "The Sandman Volume 9: The Kindly Ones" by Neil Gaiman
"I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend..."
-Delirium (who was once Delight) in "The Sandman Volume 7: Brief Lives" by Neil Gaiman
"I think maybe the whole world's gone mad..."
"Uh-Uh. It's always been like this. You probably just don't get out enough..."
"Get in, Sexton."
"But we don't know where we're going..."
"Ah, that's just part of the human condition. Isn't it neat...?"
-Sexton Furnival and Didi, in "Death: The High Cost of Living" by Neil Gaiman
"Anyway: I'm not blessed, or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do, and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes; in hospitals and forests and abbatoirs. For some folks death is a release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them..."
When the first living thing existed, I was there waiting.
When the last living thing dies, my job will be finished.
I'll put the chairs on the tables, turn out the lights, and lock the universe behind me as I leave...
-Death in "The Sandman Volume 3: Dream Country" by Neil Gaiman
"Death’s a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there’s nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay. And then you lie down and shut up forever. Lots of little deaths until the last big one..."
"Is that all I get, is that all there is?"
"Yes, I'm afraid so..."
-from Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"
"The unknown," said Faxe's soft voice in the forest, "the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion...
Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable - the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"
"That we shall die."
"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next..."
-from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness"
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating...
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis...
I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck...
I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system...
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it..."
-from Neil Gaiman's "American Gods"
"Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it..."
"It is good to have an end to journey towards – but it is the journey that matters in the end..."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
"This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story..."
"To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well...
It's unwise, though, to think you know how it's going to go, or how it's going to end. That's to be known only when it's over..."
-from Ursula K. Le Guin's "Gifts" and "The Left Hand of Darkness"
"He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does..."
-from Neil Gaiman's "Stardust"
"Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you'll see the world
If I'm not mistaken...
Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure...
Face your life
Its pain, its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken...."
"Sometimes. Mostly, no. It's like the people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean."
"You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it."
-from Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book"
"They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name..."
"If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained..."
"I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want," he said, and then he paused and he thought, "I want everything..."
-from Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book"
