Jibran > Recent Status Updates

"Sometimes it's inevitable for the past to be forgotten, especially if the present is no less horrific."

"Don't tell me that we don't need madness on the battlefield."

"The desire to come apart irrevocably will always be as strong as, if not stronger than, the drive to establish oneself."

"And yet it is that, the defeated aspect of desire, hopes dashed and ragged, which in the end outlives any exalted pronouncements striving towards the eternal."

"If this was the way of things in the world, then weren't his suffering, his imaginings and threats, all his thoughts, like a flowing stream, like powdered snow, like a swirling blizzard and his life simply a short, sad song?"

"Word are like that. Pregnant, sly, slippery, undiminishing in their rereadings as they make their ritual voyage into memory."

'I am not a failure,' I shouted at the closed door. 'I am a tragedy. This dead-pan world is full of chaos and I am one of the lost.'

"History turns out to be a bundle of lies that covers up centuries of murderous rampage around the globe..."

"A myth is true - that is to say, operationally true - insofar as it has predictive force."

"Myths have become so firmly entrenched in the radiant sky that common sense is apt to shirk the task of getting at the uncommon sense behind them."

"Where everyone lies, no one lies; where everything is lies, nothing is a lie."

"who, O Lord, can separate the joy of love from the sadness of memory?"

"Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly overinhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells."

A most boring, technical, and pretentiously worded detail of the bottle-grown babies hatchery must have excited a lot of readers in the 1930s, but the described tech of the baby assembly line seems so retro to me nearly a century later.

"If you've once been attractive, desirable and charismatic, with a good body, you never forget it. Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness. Beauty is the only thing."

"Narcissism is our religion. The selfie stick is our cross, and we must carry it everywhere."

"How the clock moves on, relentlessly,
with such assurance that it eats the years.
The days are small and transitory grapes,
the months grow faded, taken out of time.

It fades, it falls away, the moment, fired
by that implacable artillery -
and suddenly, only a year is left to us,
a month, a day, and death turns up in the diary."

"What we know is so little,
and what we presume so much,
so slowly do we learn
that we ask questions, then die.
Better for us to keep our pride
for the city of the dead
on the day of the departed,
and there, when the wind blows through
the holes in your skull,
it will unveil to you such mysteries,
whispering the truth to you
through the spaces that were your ears."

"I returned home, much older
after crossing the world.
Now I question nobody.
But I know less every day."

"One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful."

"What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.

"The essence of life is in solitude."

"from first
to final cleansing tub-
all a dream!"

"After spending two hours with a book, and finding it more pleasurable than two years of real life, I'd remember again that life had no meaning, and sink back into despair."

just inside the fence
to prohibited grounds
wild violets"

"a thing of beauty!
a new bride without a stitch
of dowry"

"People somehow manage to accustom themselves to what they first think insufferable. I, too, shall endure."

"mosquito squatting
the covers of a war epic
stained in blood."

"...we rarely seek that which we do not expect to find."

"first childbirth -
the husband feeling he himself
did half the labour"