Going through a Quarter -Life crisis ...check back in two decades...

Ok so now I totally understand this ….. I realize that I’m not strange to be feeling this ..and there are enough messed up people out there for a technical term to be created about this situation ( well not technical term exactly…) don’t I always say that 25 is the new 15 ?!?!? So here goes …I seem to have been going through and am currently in the throes of a quarter life crisis …. From the wiki

The quarterlife crisis is a term applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the ages of 21 - 29. The term is named by analogy with mid-life crisis. It is now recognised by many therapists and professionals in the mental health field. The phenomenon has been identified in Japan as 'freeter'. Abby Wilner coined the phrase in 1997 and co-authored the first book to identify this phenomenon: Quarterlife Crisis, the Unique Challenges of Life in your Twenties (Tarcher, 2001).

Some parts of the wiki that relate to my condition are :

The version of the "quarter-life crisis" proposed by Erikson, then, is very different from the one that occurs in popular culture. Indeed, the pop-culture version of the "quarter-life crisis" contains more elements of the crisis Erickson associated with adolescence, Identity vs. Role-confusion, giving credence to the theory that late-20th century life, with its bizarre mix of extreme comfort and insecurity, is then causing people to mature at a slower rate.

Two years.... and counting...

Today …apart from being my graduation cum getting a job treat day was the second anniversary of my arrival in the US …yipeee!!!… no really , I guess this was one of the anniversaries that deserved to be remembered….last year I was in India at this time …so in effect this is the first and most probably only anniversary I’ll spend in Tuscaloosa….

I remember two years ago I was at the airport in LA… first just assimilating the fact that I was in an AMERICAN airport ..i.e. I was in America…. I spent most of my dollars tasting Haagen Dazs ice cream for the first time in the airport lounge….I was stuck there for twenty four hours after a twenty two hour flight, because my flight to Atlanta kept getting delayed /cancelled .. Well made it to Atlanta and Birmingham and finally Tuscaloosa …( not all the way to t-town via Delta..but you understand)…And the rest as they say is HISTORY : ).

Post School Jitters

So I’ll be moving to a new place and taking up a new job…I am very excited about the whole thing , it’s been what I’ve been hoping for since the end of 2005, a good amalgam of my skill sets, and a great team to work with in a great city , in an office full of desis.( my manager has a Ganesh idol on her desk )…

I don’t know what it is though but I’m not as enthusiastic as I’d imagined… maybe the realization that a new chapter of life that I’ve put off for a while will start soon has me scared, will I be able to do the job well; will they like me etc etc…Suddenly responsibility has been thrust upon my shoulders …. Start paying off my student loans , credit card bills …uughhh…

Maybe if I were getting a six figure salary I’d be thrilled… but that isn’t it either…. You need relevant experience before you can start earning in six figures…

I’m trying to think of some not so obvious positive things …. Living alone in a city in a high rise and not on student income.. That’s been my dream for so long!!! So I should be excited…….

Maybe I’ll terribly miss Tuscaloosa?!?! Or maybe my experience with moving to new places has left me a little bit cynical… or maybe the fact that ‘The Day’ has come has finally dawned on me .. ‘The day’ from the time I joined graduate school three years ago ; was a kind of a milestone that I had to accomplish before I could do anything worthwhile ..so now that I’ve crossed the milestone it remains that I have to make good on my word and start doing all those things ‘I would do after I get a job…’ . Maybe I realize that even though it seems like time stands still while you’re at school … it really doesn’t ..people are growing older , just because you embrace work life but try to cling on to whatever remnants of independent student living you can doesn’t mean that others around you would stop from wanting to embrace non independent responsibility ( do you understand what I’m trying to get at ???)

… Anyway it feels that I’ve been in this safe little capsule my entire life ( being a student that is ) ,and now have been sent out to this environment where the biggest problem isn’t completing an assignment or passing an exam …. Where people want to get married to their boyfriends or crushes and have babies and pay taxes and buy houses and cook and pay higher rents and buy cars and save for retirement and….* phew* the list is endless… I don’t particularly like school … but I guess it was a good enough shield from real life….


So you realize this post is not about my job but more about how after twenty years of school I have to finally enter the real world…. So dear blog I open up to you this ambiguousness I’m feeling, because I can’t make sense of it myself ..( some consolation for me is that I do remember that I was always a bit non excited before all of my previous journeys…).

TV Song Lyrics- '06

Two memorable sets of lyrics from the Winter of ‘06

First... Chasing Cars… introduced to me via Grey’s Anatomy

Snow Patrol Chasing Cars Lyrics

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own

We don't need
Anything
Or anyone

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel

Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's burstin’ into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars
Around our heads

I need your grace
To remind me
To find my own

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old
Show me a garden that's bursting into life

All that I am
All that I ever was
It’s here in your perfect eyes
They're all I can see

I don't know where
Confused about how as well
Just know that these things
Will never change for us at all

If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Waiting on the World to Change via Brothers and Sisters

John Mayer- Waiting On The World To Change

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there's no way we ever could
now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's hard to beat the system
when we're standing at a distance
so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
now if we had the power
to bring our neighbors home from war
they would have never missed a Christmas
no more ribbons on their door
and when you trust your television


what you get is what you got
cause when they own the information, oh
they can bend it all they want

that's why we're waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's not that we don't care,
we just know that the fight ain't fair
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

and we're still waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting waiting on the world to change
one day our generation
is gonna rule the population
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

Great songs…and I’ve watched a LOT of TV this past year…………

Me but not wholly me....

I do not know how other authors feel about their writings but always I have a strange sensation when I read something that I had written some time previously. That sensation is heightened when the writing had been done in the close and abnormal atmosphere of prison and the subsequent reading had taken place outside. I recognize it of course , but not wholly , it seems almost that I was reading some familiar piece written by another , who was near to me and yet who was different . Perhaps that is the measure of the change that has taken place in me.

So I have felt about this book also. It is mine and not wholly mine ,as I am constituted today; it represents rather some past self of mine which has already joined that long succession of other selves that existed for a while and faded away , leaving only a memory behind.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Preface of the book ‘The Discovery of India’

Not that I've ever lived in an environment close to being in prison ...but I was thinking about the same thing , it's kind of “the end of an era” point for me right now… every year ,for the past few years, around this time I embark on a ‘big’ journey ..last year it was my India trip after two years , the year before it was from Wellington to Tuscaloosa and prior to that ,Udipi to Wellington…. This time around the shift isn’t going to be as drastic as I imagined ( at some point of time I thought my options consisted of either Mississippi or Southern California :) ) …

Anyway a few days ago I chanced upon my student id card from 2004 … it was from my NZ college and the photograph was from three months before my arrival in NZ , when I was still in India.I realized that I had changed fundamentally from the girl in the picture …now I think …

Would she like me ?? If I had to use one word it would probably be ‘No’, just because I truly believe I was a better person then.. ( I wonder about the series of events that led from that to this..) …

Would she appreciate where I was at this present moment ???? Maybe yes , it’s definitely not what she wanted, but it’s beyond her wildest dreams(at that point…she has had wilder dreams before and after that time period ) ….

I wonder what will happen in the future..When I read these blog entries and see my (then) old id cards... how will I answer those questions?

Personally I feel they serve as good self improvement tools and reality checks :)

On a side note.... I've decided that one characteristic to figure out if I can truly get along with a person is when a phone conversation isn't a chore...

For the traveller.....

A passage from "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran

A friend gave me the book before I left Wellington, the following passage resonated deeply then , and I guess it isn't surprising that I chance upon it once more....

"Almastafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalase for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth. And in the twelfth year on the seventh day of Lelool, the month of reaping, he climbed a hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.

Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul. But, as he ascended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:

"How shall I go in peace without sorrow? Nay, not without a word in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within it's walls., and long were the nites of aloneness; And who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and to many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands. Nor is it a thought that I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst. Yes, I cannot tarry any longer. The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark. For to stay, the hours burn in the nite, is to freeze and to crystalize and be bound in a mold. Fain that I would take with me all that is here. But how shall I?

A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that gave it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the Sun".

*********************************************************************************

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas :)

Seasons Greetings!!!

Does any one else miss Greeting Cards ( the paper variety…. I mean)

Neil Gaiman quotes

“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.”

“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 simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' 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.”


“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”

“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 you once wanted.”

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten”

“Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?”

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'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close in”

“This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.”

“It was a dark and stormy nightmare”

“I'll come to you tonight, dear, when it's late,
You will not see me; you may feel a chill.
I'll wait until you sleep, then take my fill,
And that will be your future on a plate.
They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate.”

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange

"-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."

Comics Part 3

with due respect to the copyright owners...

A life less ordinary..

....In a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, this reality is summed up succinctly. In the story, we read the words of an Indian who had come to Boston as a young man on the day the Americans first landed on the moon:

"While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly 30 years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."



"If it can be allowed that the passport is a kind of book, then the immigration officer, holding a passport in his hand, is also a reader. Like someone in a library or even, in the course of a pleasant afternoon, on a bench beneath a tree. Under the fluorescent lights, he reads the entries made in an unfamiliar hand under categories that are all too familiar. He examines the seals, the stamps, and the signatures on them.
He looks up. He reads the immigrant's responses to his questions, the clothes, the accent. The officer's eyes return to the passport. He appears to be reading it more carefully. He frowns. Suddenly he turns around and tries to catch a colleague's eye. It is nothing, he wants more coffee.
You notice all this if you are an immigrant ..."

Passport Photos, Amitava Kumar

Amitava Kumar on English Textbooks

The Hindu, Literary Review, October 2, 2005
Textbook of Laughter and Forgetting

We have repeatedly witnessed in recent years, almost like the seasonal outbreak of a distressing form of cholera, controversies over the contents of history textbooks.
But why is there no discussion about what school-children are asked to read in their English textbooks?


I have very little memory now of what I had read in the books used in my history classes, although I do remember the attention with which I would copy out on clean sheets of paper the line-drawings that represented the portraits of emperors. Akbar’s moustache drooped. Humayun was thin and wizened, already preparing, it seemed, for a premature death. The rounded lines in the portrait of Shah Jahan contained all the sorrow of love’s futile striving. Nearly everything else in those books escapes me at the moment.

This might be entirely because I was a mediocre student and, like the uninspired everywhere, I found my classes stultifying. But the fact remains that I still have vivid and exact memories of what I read in my English textbooks. It was there that I read George Orwell’s account of shooting an elephant in Burma, Dom Moraes on a trip to the Thar, Khushwant Singh’s depiction of life in the village of Mano Majra, Somerset Maugham describing the solitude on his seventieth birthday.

When I was sixteen, I left my hometown Patna to go to school in Delhi. The school where I got admission, Modern School on Barakhamba Road, was a prestigious enclave where the children of the rich and the powerful came each day as if they were visiting a familiar club. Our teachers, for the most part drawn from the Punjabi middle-class, could only use a puritanical and unimaginative pedagogy to prop themselves up against the display of wealth. They knew in their hearts that they were superfluous and stuck to the dull routine of making us read and repeat the words in the textbooks prescribed by the school board.

Nevertheless, the English textbooks that I read and reread during those two years gave me a sense of language and an idea of how to express my own sense of the world that I inhabited. This is what literature can do, even without your knowing it. Shouldn’t there be wider debate, then, on what our students read in their books?
I recently received a letter from an editor at Macmillan-India. He had written to say that he was preparing a textbook for the Intermediate level students in Bihar and he wanted permission to use an essay of mine in which I had written about a visit to the Khudabaksh Library in Patna.*

The letter brought back the mixed memories from my youth. In my reply to the editor, I readily granted permission. I didn't ask for any payment. It seemed to me that even one poor student reading me in Bihar would be worth a thousand readers in South Delhi or abroad.

When I remembered my own alienating classroom experiences, it gave me pleasure to think that now a reader in Bihar would be able to rediscover his or her own world in my writing. The names of places as well as the people, the sentiments shared by the writer, even the dust on the streets—all of this would be familiar to the student in towns like Ara or Motihari. How many times before had Bihari students found their lives reflected in the English textbooks prescribed for their courses?
Then, just last week, the postman brought a registered package from India. It was the textbook with my essay in it. I read the book quickly. The search for relevance by the education council had meant not only the inclusion of Bihari writers like Tabish Khair among the contributors but also pieces that provided urgent social critique. A good example was a poem "Voice of the Unwanted Girl" by Sujata Bhatt, written in the voice of a destroyed foetus, presenting a protest against female infanticide. Textbooks elsewhere in India should include writings like this that touch the heart and challenge the mind.

Our students need to be freed from the claustrophobia of the classroom. The prose and poetry that we offer them should appear to them fresh and enlivening. The Macmillian-India book began with a brilliant, hopeful piece by Jawaharlal Nehru, its elegant rhetoric paying homage to the arrival of Gandhi. I felt my senses lift while reading the essay. However, I'd like to see students also reading well-written critical pieces on subjects as seemingly trivial as Bombay films. Let's give them Ashis Nandy's incisive essay on P.C. Barua and Devdas. It will engage—and educate—students as much if not more than Shakespeare and Blake.

Why is it that English textbooks, including the one I was sent, are top-heavy with hagiographies of our national leaders? I have rarely seen letters printed in these books. There is very little travel-writing. There is no space ever for quality journalism. In general, we should also be publishing more women writers. To my students in America, I have taught Mahasweta Devi, Ismat Chughtai, Urvashi Butalia, and Arundhati Roy. Why are these writers not being taught in the places where I studied in India?

In the textbook that sparked these reflections, I found a story by O. Henry called "After Twenty Years." I had read this story in my English class twenty years ago. The lines of dialogue and the characteristic, surprising O. Henry twist at the end of the story came flooding back as I turned the pages. But this experience also made me distrust my pleasure and my nostalgia. Why are textbooks so remarkably unchanged even after decades?

The most disturbing aspect of the controversies over the history textbooks has been the extent to which current political interests determined what was taught in the classroom. That was detrimental, no doubt, but in the matter of English textbooks the opposite has been true. Our textbooks have remained for the most part trapped in the bubble of their own past. They continue to be hodge-podge collections of quaint pieces, somewhat suspect in their usefulness, a bit like the clay-objects strewn beside a corpse in a ceremonial grave. It is no surprise that in our professional use of the English language, as a people, we remain stiff, formal, awkward. Unless these textbooks are radically changed, our teachers will remain mummy-makers, wrapping cotton around our children's mouths.

The Unknown Errors of Our Lives

"The Unknown Errors of Our Lives"
-Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
………. It would have been the worst error of her life, and she wouldn't even have known it. It saddens her to think of all the errors people make (she has been musing over such things lately)--the unknown errors of their lives, the ones they can never put down in a book and are therefore doomed to repeat………

Another quote compilation.... WooHooo!!!

It’s been a while since I posted some quotes …. Long one..hope you find some you like .

"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house."
- George Carlin

A man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."
- Stephen Crane

When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
- Woody Allen

I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world... perhaps you've seen it?


I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
- Kahlil Gibran

Better keep yourself clear and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
- George Bernard Shaw

I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
- Etienne de Grellet

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars."
- Vasily Rozanov

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
- Helen Keller

"Do you know a cure for me?"
"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."
"Salt water?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said, "In one form or another; sweat, tears or the salt sea."
- Isak Dinesen


KAHLIL GIBRAN
Seven times have I despised my soul:
The first time when I saw her being meek
that she might attain height.
The second time when I saw her
limping before the crippled.
The third time when she was given to choose
between the hard and the easy, and she chose the easy.
The fourth time when she committed a wrong,
and comforted herself that others, also commit wrong.
The fifth time when she forbore for weakness,
and attributed her patience to strength.
The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face,
and knew not that it was one of her own masks.
And the seventh time when she sang a song of praise,
and deemed it a virtue

ON THE STEPS OF THE TEMPLE

Yester-eve, on the marble steps of the Temple, I saw a woman sitting
between two men. One side of her face was pale, the other was
blushing.

FACES

I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that
was but a single countenance as if held in a mould.

I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness
beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful
it was.

I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face
in which all things were graven.

I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves,
and behold the reality beneath.

"THE PERFECT WORLD"

God of lost souls, thou who are lost amongst the gods, hear me:

Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear
me:

I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect.

I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst
finished worlds--peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose
thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions
are enrolled and registered.

Their virtues, O God, are measured, their sins are weighed, and
even the countless things that pass in the dim twilight of neither
sin nor virtue are recorded and catalogued.

Here days and night are divided into seasons of conduct and governed
by rules of blameless accuracy.

To eat, to drink, to sleep, to cover one's nudity, and then to be
weary in due time.

To work, to play, to sing, to dance, and then to lie still when
the clock strikes the hour.

To think thus, to feel thus much, and then to cease thinking and
feeling when a certain star rises above yonder horizon.

To rob a neighbour with a smile, to bestow gifts with a graceful
wave of the hand, to praise prudently, to blame cautiously, to
destroy a sound with a word, to burn a body with a breath, and then
to wash the hands when the day's work is done.

To love according to an established order, to entertain one's best
self in a preconceived manner, to worship the gods becomingly,
to intrigue the devils artfully--and then to forget all as though
memory were dead.

To fancy with a motive, to contemplate with consideration, to be
happy sweetly, to suffer nobly--and then to empty the cup so that
tomorrow may fill it again.

All these things, O God, are conceived with forethought, born with
determination, nursed with exactness, governed by rules, directed
by reason, and then slain and buried after a prescribed method.
And even their silent graves that lie within the human soul are
marked and numbered.

It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of
supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God's garden, the master-thought
of the universe.

But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled
passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a
bewildered fragment from a burnt planet?

Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?



If you want to feel rich, just count all of the things you have that money can't buy.
- Anon

The edge of the world does not look far away, to that I am on my way running.
- Papago Indian song for a young girl

"All of the people I could be, they got fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to only one — and that's who I am. The weather man."
- David in "The Weatherman"

I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.
- Marcus Cole , "Babylon 5 "

"Who am I? I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I've gone that would not have happened if I had not come.... to understand me you must swallow a world."
- Salman Rushdie, "Midnight's Children"

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
- Saul Bellow

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
- Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H."

Two often mentioned motivations for travels are to see another world and to disappear. In that sense, a journey in the footsteps of someone who disappeared in search of another world was the perfect journey.
- Nicholas Jubber, "The Prester Quest"

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.
- Margaret Mead

"The people you care about you never really say goodbye to."
- MTV's "The Real World"

Basically, I have this theory that there are five kinds of truth. There is the truth you tell to casual strangers and acquaintances. There is the truth you tell to your general circle of friends and family members. There is the truth you tell to only one or two people in your entire life. There is the truth you tell to yourself. And finally, there is the truth that you do not admit even to yourself.
- JMS's Theory Of The Five Truths

Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.
- Horace Walpole

Those of you who think that you know everything are particularly annoying to those of us who do.
- Anon

Once I dreamed I was a butterful, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterful dreaming that I am Chuang Tzu.
- Chuang Tzu


The trouble with being a young female is that you have to sound like Hermione Grainger in the classroom and look like Beyonce on a night out. This standard of perfection is so excessiev that it's taking a terrible toll.
- Medb Ruane, "The Irish Independent"

I’ve never liked the Valentine’s Day holiday. Our culture celebrates romantic love morning, noon, and night 364 days a year – and then sets aside one special day every February to really rub the lovelesses’ noses in it. Not so nice. So: if you are lucky enough to have a sweetheart, of course you must kiss her (or him) today. But if you want to do a good deed, give a thought to the many lonely people around you: the divorced, the widowed, the unlucky – and maybe, if you have a spare dollar or two, you might want to send a small anonymous bouquet to one of them. Oh – and send it to the office, where everybody can see.
- David Frum

"Why am I always at, uh, weddings, and never actually getting married, now?"
"It's probably 'cause you're a bit scruffy. Or it could also be 'cause you haven't met the right girl."
"Ah, but you see, is that it? Maybe I have met the right girls. Maybe I meet the right girls all the time. Maybe it's me. "
- "Four Weddings & A Funeral

"I'm quite certain that to to make you happy, look after you, and keep you safe is the purpose of my life."
- Jerry Burton, second-time lucky with the girl of his dreams, "Miss Marple: The Moving Finger"

"You make me want to be a better man."
"That's maybe the best compliment of my life."
"Well maybe I overshot a little, because I was aiming at just enough to keep you from walking out. "
- Melvin Udall & Carol, "As Good As It Gets"

"Love is when you look into someone's eyes and suddenly you go all the way inside, to their soul, and you both know instantly. I always imagined I'd fall in love nursing a blind soldier who was wounded in battle. Or maybe while rescuing someone in the middle of a blizzard, seconds before the avalanche hits. I thought at least by the age of 15 I'd have a love life, but I don't even have a _like_ life."
- Angela, "My So Called Life"

"I have to believe that it works...that when two people come together they stay together. I have to take that to bed with me at night even if I'm going to bed alone. That's a McBealism."
-Ally, "Ally McBeal"

"You would be the greatest choice I would ever make."
- Andy to Nina on "Everwood"



"Look at it mathematically. If just one person hooks up with somebody who isn't their soulmate, you got a chain reaction that screws it up for everybody on the planet."
- Jonesy to David, "Buying the Cow"

"I realized at that moment, there is no such thing as the one. it's more of a mind boggling whole hell of a lot of pontential ones, and while that should be comforting, it's actually pretty terrifying. We'd all like to kick back, and wait for some magical force to show us who we should spend the rest of our lives with, but the truth is there isn't a lightning bolt that slaps you on the ass and tells you to pick this person over all others. If anything its like the rain. Rain falls all the time, sometimes you're prepared for it, sometimes you're not, and depending on where you are when it hits you either get caught in it, or you dont. In fact most of us try like hell to avoid it. You might miss the bus, you might catch the bus. Maybe you remembered your umbrella, maybe you didn't. No big signs just random torrential bursts of opportunity."
- David, "Buying the Cow"

Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.
- Dante

Love? Pah. Overrated. Here, look, these are my three wives: Pestilence, Famine and Death. Do you think I married them for their personalities? Their personalities could shatter entire planets! Arranged marriages, every one, but they worked out. They inspired me. Knowing that they are waiting at home for me is what keeps me here -- 75 light years away.
- Londo, "Babylon 5 - The War Prayer"

And then the question dreaded by all singletons, "How's the love life?"
- Bridget, "Bridget Jones's Diary"



In her own special category, she was quite beautiful. This was the category of all the women, in his entire life, who had ever thought he was worth smiling at.
- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

Sorry. I thought I recognized landmarks in your face, felt familiar contours along the bones of your hand, caught a cry that tore in flight across your voice. Forgive me for staring. Someone I knew once lived there.
- Leslie Crutchfield Tompkins

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."
- Saul Bellow

"She's got character, she doesn't even take it out on other people when she's having a bad day."
- Rob describes Laura, "High Fidelity"