Shirley > Recent Status Updates

"Dante's Virgil was wring to tell him that there is no greater sorrow than to remember past happy times when one is in misery. Memory is a solace. Perhaps the only one. Memory is also the best of companions."

"There are times when we should stop to take a look at the whole picture: our past and our present. What we have learned and the mistakes we made."

"Love alone is not enough. I need to fall in love with my husband. Love isn't just a feeling; it's an art. And like any art, it takes not only inspiration, but also a lot of work."

"I love and no one can take that away from me. [...] I'm vulnerable, but I don't regret that."

"The longer the list, the more productive I consider my day to be. Many of the tasks are things I promised to do the day before or durinhlg the week, but which I haven't yet done. That's why the list keeps growing, until it makes me so nervous that I decide to scrap the whole thing and start again. And then I realize that nothing on the list is actually very important."

"After a certain age, we put on a mask of confidence and certainty. In time, that mask gets stuck to our face and we can't remove it. [...] We don't show our feelings because people might think we're vulnerable and take advantage of us."

"Today I am a woman torn between the terror that everything might change and the equal terror that everything might carry on exactly the same for the rest of my days."

"I had never told her how much I loved her. [...] There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. [...] There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? [...] Here is the point of everything I've been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary."

"...thousands of people were left to suffer hope."

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

"What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? ... Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other..."

"I wanted to cry but I didn't cry, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering,..."

"In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that..."

The origins of female sexuality as sacred and the journey through forgetting and rediscovering, masked in literature and driven by Christian ideology.

"...it occured to me once again that grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost."

"'Domestic bliss' - the pairing of those words made perfect sense to me. I don't mean to strike an inappropriate note, but few things have ever made me happier in my life than the sight of Connie's underwear drying on my radiator." :)

"...after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions of our distant pasts have all been posed and we're left with 'how was your day?' and 'when will you be home?' and 'have you put the bins out?' Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia."

"My wife had brought me everything I had ever wanted, everything good and worthwhile, and we had been through so much together. To contemplate a life without her; I found it inconceivable." Heartbreaking.

"Our self is not essentially a body or a mind." Both bodily sensations as well as thoughts and ideas are seen and understood by our self, just as it sees and understands objects in the world, it gets aware of them but is not identical with them.

"Whatever we essentially are must also be ever present." If something we get aware of appears and disappears, this is not an essential part of our being.

Our thoughts obscure the knowledge / awareness of our being/self, this is the source of unhappiness.

"The way a person sees or understands him or herslef deeply conditions the ways he or she sees and understands objects, others and the world."

"Ich finde, es sollte eine Regel geben, dass jeder Mensch auf der Welt wenigstens einmal in seinem Leben Standing Ovations bekommen muss." Schön. :)

"Komisch, wie man sich wegen mancher Sachen manchmal total verrückt macht, und am Ende ist es gar nichts."

Der Perspektivwechsel zu Augusts Schwester gefällt mir gut. Die Sprache bekommt einen anderen Ton.

Und noch so ein schöner Gedanke: "Wie wahr waren Geschichten, die einem erzählt wurden, und wie wahr die, die ich mir selbst aus Erinnerungen, Vermutungen, Phantasien und heimlich Erlauschtem zusammenreimte? Manchmal wurden erfundene Geschichten im Nachhinein wahr, und manche Geschichten erfanden Wahrheit."

Schöner Gedanke: "..., dass nicht nur das Vergessen eine Form des Erinnerns war, sondern auch das Erinnern eine Form des Vergessens..."

Schwimmen klingt hier so romantisch und befreiend. Vielleicht sollte ich es auch mal wieder versuchen?