But now I knew that true love was above all that and that it would be better to die than to fail to love. I had thought that only others had the courage to love. But now I discovered that I too was capable of loving. Even if loving meant leaving, or solitude, or sorrow, love was worth every penny of its price. (from By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)
I also knew that from this moment on I was going to experience heaven and hell, joy and pain, dreams and hopelessness; that I would no longer be capable of containing the winds that blew from the hidden corners of my soul. I knew that from this moment on love would be my guide and that it had waited to lead me ever since childhood, when I had felt love for the first time. (from "By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept")
Stay crazy and behave like normal people.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book.
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
It may happen that one may write some messy and useless things (this happens often) without realizing it or without wanting to realize it, which is quite possible, because paper is a far too tolerant material. You can write over it any vastness, and it doesn't protest: it isn't like the wood in the armours of mine shafts, that creaks when it's overloaded.
Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right. (from "The Amber Spyglass")
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
The most important meetings have already been combined by souls before the bodies are even created. Usually, they happen when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. Meetings await us, but most of the time we avoid them happening. If we're desperate, instead, if we have nothing left to lose or we're quite enthusiastic about life, then the unknown occurs and our universe changes tack. (from "11 minutes")