Favorite Quotes

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in some one’s eyes.

-Frances Hodgson Burnett in The Secret Garden 

Don’t expect roasted chickens to fly into your mouth.

-Devakant Brusca paraphrasing George Gurdjieff

Much like the era of Church schism introduced by Luther four centuries earlier, the entire world was gripped by an immense unrest. Everywhere lines of battle formed; everywhere bitter enmity sprang up between old and young, between fatherland and humanity, between Red and White. We in our day can no longer reconstruct, let alone comprehend and sympathize with the impetus and power of such labels as Red and White, let alone the real meanings of all those battle cries. Much as in Luther's time, we find all over Europe, and indeed over half the world, believers and heretics, youths and old men, advocates of the past and advocates of the future, desperately flailing at each other. Often the battlefronts cut across frontiers, nations, and families. We may no longer doubt that for the majority of the fighters themselves, or at least for their leaders, all of this was highly significant, just as we cannot deny many of the spokesmen in those conflicts a measure of robust good faith, a measure of idealism, as it was called at the time. Fighting, killing, and destroying went on everywhere, and everywhere both sides believed they were fighting for God against the devil.

-Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game

Nobody has ever gone astray, nobody can go astray. It is not possible to commit error. Let me repeat it: it is impossible to go astray, because wherever you go is God, and whatsoever you do culminates in divinity. All acts are naturally transformed into the ultimate--good and bad, all; sinner and saint, all reach to God. God is not something that you can avoid, but if you have some ideal you can postpone. You cannot avoid. Sooner or later God is going to take possession of you, but you can postpone. You can postpone indefinitely; that is your freedom.

-Osho in Putting Shoes on a Snake

Every so often there were supernovas, flashing with phenomenal brilliance and vanishing. He ralized that his accelerated time travel made them as brief to him as the flashes of lightbulbs, but still they were bright in passing! He began to perceive a pattern ot the changing positions of the more stable stars, patches of stars, and clouds of gas and dust. The galaxy was rotating, turning more rapidly in the center than at the edge, as if stirred by a cosmic spoon. Once he realized that, his perception became truly three-dimensional, and he saw him as part of the giant, viscous mix of material. The galaxy had seemed stationary when he had been fixed in time; now he saw it as a porridge of stars and dust. In fact, the dust was stretched out in great spirals, moving outward from the center, and at the fringes of those bands of dust the stars were thickest and brightest, for the dust was their raw material. Stars did not form from mere contractions of gas amidst vacuum; they were squeezed into life by the tidal fluxes of the galaxy itself, like eddy whorls against the shifting dust.

Squeeze.

Oh, yes-a billion years had passed! Entranced, he continued to watch. Having analyzed the pattern of the great rotating galactirc disk, he was now able to perceive the broader universe beyond, the neighboring galaxies, moving and spinning in their own courses and gradually drawing together. Stars kept moving in on their dust banks and disappearing into them, while the bands themselves snaked out toward the extremes. The galactic centers grew brighter. 

Squeeze.

Another billion years already! He was still accelerating in time, but also becoming more absorbed by the wonder of the universe about him, so that time seemed to pass faster, anyway. Objective, subjective--what was the truer definition of time? Fascinated by the moving panorama of space, Norton began to race the pattersn of whole galactic clusters. His perspective kept expanding as he came to understand the more fundamental motions of the universe.

Squeeze.

Now it was easier to see how the galaxies were all converging on a signle region of space, like shining pin-wheels rolling on to a rendezvous. And the galaxies themselves were changing as they went, their centers becoming brighter despite the flow of dust and stars out from them.

Squeeze.

After that he pretty much ignored the squeeze markers, for they were coming faster as his sphere of awareness expanded. It almost seemed as if the universe were shrinking.

Suddenly a band of dust and gas passed across his region,momentarily blotting out his vision. When it passed, the sun was gone. Startled, he cast about for it; he had tuned it out in his effort to perceive the patterns of motion of the farther galactic clusters. It was definitely gone.

Well, how many billions of years had passed now? Six, eight? Mankind would not feel the loss! He let the sun go with momentary regret and refocused on the universe at large, which was really more interesting.

It was definitely shrinking. He verified this by fixing his attention on one particular spot and gauging the contracvtion of galactric groups around it. His perception seemed to have accomodated the enormous distances separating galaxies, so that he could know where they were even though, theoretically, it took billions of years for the light of the farthest ones to reach him. Perhaps this was because he himself was traveling rapidly in time; he didn't ahve to wait on the normal speed of light. Or maybe it was simply another facet of the magic of the Hourglass.

Shrinking? How could that be? The universe was supposed to be expanding!

Yet as the billions of years squeezed by, ten, eleven, twelve, he became certain; the universe was indeed contracting. It became small enough for him to see completely, then smaller yet. Dismayed and enthralled, he watched it form into a giant globe perhaps four billion light-years across. The galaxies were becoming quasars, with huegly radiating centers and tenuous umbras of dust and gas, and these dissolved into formless waves, much as the indivudal stars had dissolved into the dust cloud sbefore. The universe became a great ball of gases and energy that then compressed into a mass of plasma less than a billion lightyears in diametere, a super-duper nova. 

It shrank into the size of a single quasar, then, so rapidly it was an eyeblnk, into the size of a single planet, and disappeared.

Norton stared at the distant point of notningness. If this was to be the way the universe ended, winking out in fifteen billion years or so, how did that differ from the manner in which it had begun? Perplexed, Norton reversed directions, turning the sand its most intense blue, and willed himself back in time.

-Piers Anthony in Bearing an Hourglass