>No need to be tide to rise and fall

"We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die."

"Captain?""Yeah?" "Do you think it was destiny that brought us together?"
He squinted and, after a thoughtful moment, shook his head. "No. I'm pretty sure it was Cinder."
― Marissa Meyer, Cress

― Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

"To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?" ― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

― ― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West


"Fate loves the fearless." ― James Russell Lowell

I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping."

— P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

"Happiness, you see, its just an illusion of Fate, a heavenly sleight of hand designed to make you believe in fairy tales. But there's no happily ever after. You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books." ― Ellen Hopkins
No need to be tide to rise and fall

Vicissitudes
Time's malleability

Balances flow into one another .Their boundaries are seldom clearly drawn

"His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children." ― Ann Brashares, The Last Summer

"And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability." ― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

"The more I let go, the more electric I become, resonating across tides and currents, touching the sweetest gems encircling me, calling me home. The water in which I'm suspended charges me like a battery that runs on lightning." ― Laurie Perez, The Power of Amie Martine .

The inbetween

"But unlike sirens, selkies don't mean any harm with their songs. They don't sing to seduce or to kill. Their songs have nothing to do with anyone but themselves. They sing for the simple joy of it, and because of that, I imagine their songs are more beautiful than those of any siren." ― Betsy Cornwell, Tides

"It was always the secrets that hurt us, wasn't it? Not the telling of them." ― Betsy Cornwell, Tides .

Happiness is pleasure without regret ― Leo Tolstoy

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. ― E.B. White

Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare." ― Alfred Hitchcock

Longing, whether for a passion or person....

"Longing, whether for a passion or person...., is one of the most powerful, yet painful, emotions there is. It can drive you to its source under the most extreme conditions, or it can cripple you from obtaining your dreams. When it comes to the pull you feel, always go after it, if not, it'll eat you alive." ― jennifer salaiz To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." ― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

"Every moment has its pleasures and its hope." ― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

"I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary's force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness." ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

The memory

"If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend." ― Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse .

"‎Pleasure is wild and sweet. She likes purple flowers. She loves the sun and the wind and the night sky. She carries a silver bowl full of liquid moonlight. She has a cat named Midnight with stars on his paws. Many people mistrust Pleasure, and even more misunderstand her. For a long time I could barely stand to be in ...the same room with her..." ― J. Ruth Gendler, The Book of Qualities

Undifferentiated

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read." ― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming one is a painter—extracted something that transcends them." "
- Marcel Proust


No need to be tide to rise and fall


  Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?  
How can one be substantial without casting a shadow?

I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole

"It was quite a wedding and as I stood there watching I realized something I'd forgotten a long time ago. Sometimes in life there really are bonds formed that can never be broken. Sometimes you really can find that one person who will stand by you no matter what. Maybe you will find it in a spouse and celebrate it with your dream wedding. But there's also the chance that the one person you can count on for a lifetime, the one person who knows you sometimes better than you know yourself is the same person who's been standing beside you all along." ― Greg DePaul

 
 

The heart of Designe and the Art of Shadowes

The heart pf Designe and the Art of Shadowes "And now we come to the Heart of our Designe: the art of Shaddowes you must know well, Walter, and you must be instructed how to Cast them with due Care. It is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe (and I turn this Thought over in my Mind: what Life is there which is not a Portmanteau of Shaddowes and Chimeras?). I build in the Day to bring News of the Night and of Sorrowe, I continued, and then I broke off for Walter's sake." ― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

There was nothing the matter out there

It was in here, with me. I decided I'd better go to work, maybe that would exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast counter now. I didn't want any, anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers. In the end I didn't go to work, either. I couldn't, I wouldn't have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come, and it was no idle excuse, even though I was upright on my two legs. I roamed around the rest of the day in the sunshine. Wherever the sunshine was the brightest, I sought and stayed in that place, and when it moved on I moved with it. I couldn't get it bright enough or strong enough. I avoided the shade, I edged away from it, even the slight shade of an awning or of a tree. And yet the sunshine didn't warm me. Where others mopped their brows and moved out of it, I stayed - and remained cold inside. And the shade was winning the battle as the hours lengthened. It outlasted the sun. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on, the time of dreams, the enemy. ("Nightmare")" ― Cornell Woolrich, Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Mystery Novels

No need to be tide to rise and fall
"Despite the sea being wild and the waves rolling away from the shore, the tide always returns." ― Katherine McIntyre, By the Sea