#lock

Isn't it funny how the memories you cherish before a breakup can become your worst enemies afterwards? The thoughts you loved to think about, the memories you wanted to hold up to the light and view from every angle--it suddenly seems a lot safer to lock them in a box, far from the light of day and throw away the key. It's not an act of bitterness. It's an act if self-preservation. It's not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it? ↗

— Ally Condie

#box #breakup #church #day #first

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#chains-of-events #commonplaces-of-existence #cross-purposes #fiction #on-fiction

Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in. ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#writing-life #life

Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#good-and-evil #sherlock-holmes #life

I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of daily life. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#sherlock-holmes #life

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only the electronic clocks but the wind-up kind too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again. There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling I had to believe whatever clocks said -and calendars. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#human #life #slaughterhouse-five #time #life

Let us crush these so-called biological clocks that give us nothing but fear, and encourage us to make stupid decisions. Let us crush these biological clocks that hurt us and rob us of the fabulous lives that Jesus died to give us. These clocks that not only hurt us, but hurt many generations after us. It is time. We need you. ↗

— Osayi Osar-Emokpae

#generations #life #singleness #woman #life

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#building-blocks #earth #existence #life #molecules

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him." [An Invitation to Learning, January 1942] ↗

— Rex Stout

#dickens #larger-than-life #novels #presence #realism

He’s very pretty. For a human.” “He’s very broken,” said Magnus. “Like a lovely vase that someone has smashed. Only luck and skill can put it back together the way it was before. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#magnus-bane #love