"This will hurt."

"I know who you are. I love you. I love everything about you that hurts."

_____

"Depressives don't [to be happy]. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing."

_____

"Why isn't love enough?"

"Where is this "love"? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words. "

"Don't stop loving me. I can see it draining out of you. It's me, remember? It was a stupid thing to do and it meant nothing. If you love me enough, you'll forgive me."

"Ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood."

_____

"What's so great about the truth? Try lying for a change, it's the currency of the world."

"Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off."

_____

"You've ruined my life."

I finally finished "Till We Have Faces." It's a wonderful book with some awesome insights. I would suggest it to anyone looking for a book to read.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"The freshness and wetness all about me (I had seen nothing but drought and withered things for many months before my sickness) made me feel that I had misjudged the world; it seemed kind, and laughing, as if its heart also danced. Even my ugliness I could not quite believe in. Who can feel ugly when the heart meets delight? It is as if, somewhere inside, within the hideous face and bony limbs, one is soft, fresh, lissom, and desireable." -- pg. 96

"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can't help?" -- pg. 111

"I had never seen men at their pleasures before: the gobbling, snatching, belching, hiccupping, the greasiness of it all, the bones thrown on the floor, the dogs quarreling under our feet." -- pg. 223-224

"You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands, for she is there also. Die before you die. there is no chance after." -- pg. 279

"No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race, for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with our destiny. How bitter this [is], every ill-favored woman will know. We have all had our dream of some other land, some other world, some other way of giving the prizes which would bring us in as the conquerers: leave the smooth, rounded limbs, and the little pink and white faces, and the hair like banished gold, far behind; their day ended, and ours come." -- pg. 282-283

"There was utter silence all around me. And now for the first time i knew what I had been doing. While i was reading, it had, once and again, seemed strange to me that the reading took so long; for the book was a small one. Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over - perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it forever, quick as i could, starting the first word against almost before the last was out of my mouth, if the judge had not stopped me. And the voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice." -- pg. 292

"The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was the answer." -- pg. 294

"I know not, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you." -- pg. 308

There are so many questions...so many questions in life. I wish I had some answers.

This is from the movie called "
The Legend of 1900":

Take a piano. Keys begin. Keys end. You know there are 88 of them. Nobody can tell you any different. They are not infinite. You are infinite. And on those keys, the music that you can make is infinite. I like that. That, I can live by. But you get me up on that gangway and you roll in, out in front of me, a keyboard of millions of keys, millions and billions of keys that never end, and that's the truth, Max, that they never end. That keyboard is infinite. And if that keyboard is infinite then on that keyboard, there is no music you can play. You're sitting on the wrong bench. That's God's piano.
...
How do you do it down there? How do you choose just one? Just one woman? One house? One piece of land to call your own; one landscape to look at? One way to die? All that world just weighing down on you. And you don't even know where it comes to an end! And aren't you ever just scared of breaking apart at the thought of it? At the enormity of living it?
...
You played out your happiness, but on a piano that was not infinite. I learned to live that way." -- 1900

If you have too much, you won't know what to do with it all.

Amazing movie...good music.

I Do
Pedro the Lion

and when his tiny head emerged from hair and folds of skin
i thought to myself if he only knew he would climb right back in
i do
now that my blushing bride has done what she was born to do
it's time to bury dreams and raise a son to live vicariously through
the sperm swims for the egg
the finger for the ring
if i could take one back
i know what it would be

How do you decide what to do? What would you do? Why? Which one would you take back?

Quotes from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis:
(No, I did not copy the entire book!)

�Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to �do it on their own.�� ~ 7

�We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human�s mind against the Enemy. He wants me to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.� ~ 25

�Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient�s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust h is benevolence out to the remote circumference, to the people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largly imaginary.� ~ 28

�Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn�t think of doctrines as primarily �true� or �false�, but was �academic� or �practical�, �ortorn� or �contemporary�, �conventional� or �ruthless�. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the church.� ~ 31

�When humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians on the other hand, when they believe in us; we cannot make them materialists and sceptics.� ~ 31

�Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, he relies on the troughs even more than the peaks; some of his special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.� ~ 38

�One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with loathsome little replicas of Himself.� ~ 38-39

�We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; he is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.� ~ 39

�In the first place I have always found that the trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex.� ~ 43

�The attack has a much better chance of success when the man�s whole inner world is drab and cold and empty.� ~ 43

�Talk to him about �moderation� in all things. If you can get him to the point of thinking that �religion is all very well up to a point�, you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all � and more amusing.� ~ 46

�All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary.� ~ 50

��I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but actually be, a different man in each of the circles he frequents.� ~ 51

�Humour for them is the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame.� ~ 55

�It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one � the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.� ~ 60-61

�Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When he talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.� ~ 65

�Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.� ~ 67

�Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? � Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, �By jove! I�m being humble�, and almost immediately pride � pride at his own humility � will appear.� ~ 69

�Let him not think of it as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character.� ~ 70

�The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour�s talents � or in a sunrise, or an elephant, or a waterfall.� ~ 71

�For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with his right hand what He has taken away with his left.� ~ 72

�It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities.� ~ 76

�The real fun is working up hatred between those who say �mass� and those who say �holy communion� when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker�s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas� in any form which would hold water for five minutes.� ~ 84

�Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.� ~ 88

�If challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.� ~ 88

�Males are best turned to gluttons with the help of their vanity. They ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found the only restaurant in the town where the steaks are really �properly� cooked. What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit.� ~ 89-90

�The Enemy�s demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete abstinence or unmitigated monogamy.� ~ 93

�We have [used] the poets and novelists [to] persuad[e] the humans that a curious, and usually short lived, experience which they call �being in love� is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding.� ~ 93

�The truth is that whenever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relationship is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.� ~ 96

�Leave it to them to discuss whether �Love� or patriotism, or celibacy, or candles on altars, or teetotalism, or education, are �good� or �bad�. Can�t you see there�s no answer? ~ 98

�For as things are, your man has now discovered the dangerous truth that these attacks don�t last forever; consequently you cannot use again what is, after all, our best weapon � the belief of ignorant humans, that there is no hope of getting rid of us except by yielding.� ~ 105

�Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, we thus aggravate the female�s chronic horror of growing old (with many excellent results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children.� ~ 107

�Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being �frank� and �healthy� and getting back to nature. As a result we are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist � making he role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.� ~ 107

�Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And he sense of injury depends on the feelings that a legitimate claim has been denied.� ~ 111

�Everything has to be twisted before it�s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.� ~ 118-119

�A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, and inquisitor, or a magician, makes better sport in hell than a mere common tyrant or debauchee.� ~ 123

�Yes; courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity.� ~ 141

�A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others.� ~ 142

�[The humans], of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so.� ~ 154

�Hatred we can manage. The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion and it is only a question of guiding this susceptibility into the right channels.� ~ 160

�But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful � horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate.� ~ 160

�He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger, will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.� ~ 162

�He knows that Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it.� ~ 162

�At any rate, you will soon find that the justice of Hell is purely realistic, and concerned with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself.� ~ 165

�Make full use of the fact that up to a certain point, fatigue makes women talk more and men talk less.� ~ 167

�All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: �Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!� Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, �Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite�.� ~ 200

Applicable quotes from the first 7 chapters.

"Every woman I've ever met feels it – something deeper than just the sense of failing at what she does. An underlying gut feeling at failing at who she is. I am not enough, and I am too much at the same time.”

“We feel unseen, even by those who are closest to us. We feel unsought – that no one has the passion or the courage to pursue us, to get past our messiness to find the woman deep inside.”

“I simply loved feeling wanted and fought for. This desire is set deep in the heart of every little girl – and every woman. Yet most of us are ashamed of it. We downplay it. We pretend that it is less than it is.”

“Most women define themselves in terms of their relationships, and the quality they deem those relationships to have. I am a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. Or, I am alone.”

“Most women do not feel they are playing an irreplaceable role in a great story. Oh, no. We struggle to know if we matter at all.”

“Most women hate their vulnerability. We are not inviting – we are guarded. Most of our energy is spent trying to hide our true selves, and control our worlds to have some sense of security.”

“Every woman knows now that she is not what she is meant to be. And fears that soon it will be known – if it hasn’t already been discovered – and that she will be abandoned. Left alone to die a death of the heart. That’s a woman’s worst fear – abandonment.”

“Shame is what makes us look away, so we avoid eye contact with strangers and friends. Shame is that feeling that haunts us, the sense that if someone really knew us, they would shake their heads in disgust and run away. Shem makes us feel, no, believe, that we do not measure up – not to the world’s standards, the church’s standards, or our own.”

“We don’t feel that we are irreplaceable, so we try and make ourselves useful. We don’t believe we are beautiful, so we work hard to be outwardly beautiful or we “let ourselves go” and hide behind a persona that has no allure. We try so hard, and in so many ways, to protect our hearts from further pain.”

“What is this thing [in most men] that just doesn’t want to go deep into a woman’s world? You are too much. To hard. It’s too much work. Men are simpler. Easier. And isn’t that just the message you’ve lived with all your life as a woman? “You’re too much, and not enough. You’re just not worth the effort.” (And why is it such an effort? There must be something wrong with you.)”

“Back off, or Leave her alone, or You don’t really want to go there – she’ll be too much for you is something Satan has set against every woman from birth. It’s the emotional and spiritual equivalent of leaving a little girl by the side of the road to die. And to every woman he has whispered, You are alone, or, When they see who you really are, you will be alone, or No one will ever truly come for you.”

“But the truth is, he is afraid. He fears that having delved into his woman’s world, he won’t have what it takes to help her there. That is his sin. That is his cowardice. And because of her shame, most of the time a man gets away with it. Most marriages (and long-term dating relationships) reach this sort of unspoken settlement. “I’m not coming any closer. This is as far as I’m willing to go. But, I won’t leave, and that ought to make you happy.” And so there is this sort of détente, a cordial agreement to live only so close.”

“Part of the reason women are so tired is because we are spending so much energy trying to “keep it together.” So much energy devoted to suppressing pain and keeping a good appearance.”

“We all still need to know, Do you see me? Am I captivating? Di I have beauty all my own?”

Quotes are so much easier than trying to put words to how you're feeling. It's the easy way out, but a way out nonetheless.

“If we were the share our lives together, why didn't we share our lives together. I know you don't have to tell me everything, but why wouldn't you want to? Unless there is someone else you are waiting for.”

– It's over. Why can't you just let it go?
– I can't.
– Why?
– Because I was happy. Because if this theory is wrong, men don't leave all women, they leave me.
– I know it hurts. I know. It's so hard to believe that something that wonderful can ever happen to us again.

– How's your heart?
– It's a little bit broken.

“Nothing that a bottle of Jack and a straight razor won't fix.”

– Love is not always that easy.
– Nothing worth getting ever is.

– You know, I may never be alone with you again. So about that day you packed, why'd you do it?
– We were so young. We both had tempers, we said stupid things so I packed. Got on my very first 747, and you didn't come after me.
– I didn't know that you wanted me to.

– I came to find you.
– You did?
– Yeah, I'm making the big gesture.

“Love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without. If you don't start with that, what are you going to end up with? Fall head over heels. I say find someone you can love like crazy and who'll love you the same way back. And how do you find him? Forget your head and listen to your heart. I'm not hearing any heart. Run the risk, if you get hurt, you'll come back. Because, the truth is there is no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love - well, you haven't lived a life at all. You have to try. Because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived.”

“A clean break is easier. You can reset it, and it heals, and you move on, but if you leave things messy, and things don't get put right, then it just hurts, forever.”