destinations... are often a surprise to the destined...

“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..."

ordinary proof...

"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"

different stars... different destinies...

"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 more things change... the more they stay the same...

"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

when you dream, sometimes you remember... when you wake, you always forget...

"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"

life is no play...

"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

so live...

"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"

you can be me when i'm gone...

...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

but i can pretend...

"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

but we don't know where we're going...

"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

farewells...

"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

you get what anyone gets... you get a lifetime...

"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"

not knowing everything, is all that makes it ok sometimes...

"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...

"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"

the road goes ever on...

"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 is your story...

"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"

the center of our own worlds...

"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"

leave no path untaken...

"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"

footprints...

"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"

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"