Caging Skies Quotes

“The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people’s minds.”
― Christine Leunens, Caging Skies

“it was a cruel irony that the only human being who could console me was the very one who made me suffer.”
― Christine Leunens, Caging Skies

“Emotions lead you to what logic is incapable of finding on its own.”
― Christine Leunens, Caging Skies

“What’s most important in this life is invisible.”
― Christine Leunens, Caging Skies

“Lies are like easy friends, there to help you out of troubled waters. Short term. But long term, they're traitors only there to make a wreckage out of your life...”
― Christine Leunens, Caging Skies

“The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people's minds. They escape the liar's grip like seeds let loose in the wind, sprouting a life of their own in the least expected places, until one day the liar finds himself contemplating a lonely but nonetheless healthy tree, grown off the side of a barren cliff. It has the capacity to sadden him as much as it does to amaze. How could that tree have got there? How does it manage to live? It is extraordinarily beautiful in its loneliness, built on a barren untruth, yet green and very much alive.
Many years have passed since I sowed the lies, and thus lives, of which I am speaking. Yet more than ever, I shall have to sort the branches out carefully, determine which ones stemmed from truth, which from falsehood. Will it be possible to saw off the misleading branches without mutilating the tree beyond hope? Perhaps I should rather uproot the tree, replant it in flat, fertile soil. But the risk is great. My tree has adapted in a hundred and one ways to its untruth, learned to bend with the wind, live with little water. It leans so far it is horizontal, a green enigma halfway up and perpendicular to a tall, lifeless cliff. Yet it is not lying on the ground, its leaves rotting in dew as it would if I replanted it. Curved trunks cannot stand up, any more than I can straighten my posture to return to my twenty-year-old self. A milder environment, after so long a harsh one, would surely prove fatal.
I have found the solution. If I simply tell the truth, the cliff will erode chip by chip, stone by stone. And the destiny of my tree? I hold my fist to the sky and let loose my prayers. Wherever they go, I hope my tree will land there.”
― Christine Leunens, Caging Skies

“But no, we who putter out slowly with strength and courage won’t find our names engraved on any bronze plaque. They won’t chisel our names into any monumental slab of granite.”
― Christine Leunens, Caging Skies