Can words sprout wings? Can they glide like butterflies through the air? Can they captivate us, carry us off into another world? Can they open the last secret chambers of our souls?
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Death)
I think of them every day, I wonder what they would say at a given moment. I ask them for advice, even today, at my age, when it will soon be time to be thinking of my own death.
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Only a few days earlier he had explained to her that he did not merely read books but traveled with them, that they took him to other countries and unfamiliar continents, and that with their help he was always getting to know new people, many of whom even became his friends.
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"Who are you? What's your name?"
"Mi Mi."
"Do you hear that thumping noise?"
"No."
"It must be here somewhere." Tin Win knelt down. Now it was nearly next to his ear. "I hear it more and more distinctly. A soft pulsing. You really don't hear it?"
"No."
"Close your eyes."
Mi Mi closed her eyes. "Nothing," she said, and laughed. Tin Win leaned over and felt her breath on his face. "I think it's coming from you." He crept closer to her and held his head just in front of her chest.
There it was. Her heartbeat. "
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Love)
Of course I am not referring to those outburts of passions that drive us to do and say things we will later regret, that delude us into thinking we cannot life without a certain person, that set us quivering with anxiety at the mere possibility we might ever lose that person-a feeling that impoverishes rather than enriches us because we long to possess what we cannot, to hold on what we cannot.
No. I speak of a love that brings sight to the blind. Of a love stronger than fear. I speak of a love that breathes meaning into life, that defies the natural laws of deterioration, that causes us to flourish, that knows no bounds. I speak of the triumph of the human spirit over selfishness and death.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Love)
We wish to be loved as we ourselves would love. Any other way makes as uncomfortable. We respond with doubt and suspicion. We misinterpret the signs. We do not understand the language. We accuse. We assert that the other person does not love us. But perhaps he merely loves us in some idiosyncratic way that we fail to recognize.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Death)
Death is not the end of life, but a stage thereof.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Life)
Life is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Life)
And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know ceases to exist. A moment that transform us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next.
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She hoped that Tin Win would learn what she had learned over the years: that there are wounds time does not heal, though it can reduce them to a manageable size.
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