#pilgrim

Billy covered his head with his blanket. He always covered his head when his mother came to see him in the mental ward - always got much sicker until she went away. It wasn’t that she was ugly, or had bad breath or a bad personality. She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education. She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone through so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#depression #mothers #education

Wait, we can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf, and eat hot h'ors d'ourves. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller. And for all of these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground. ↗

— Paul Rudnick

#indians #native-americans #pilgrims #thanksgiving #family

this song is for the guy who keeps yelling from the balcony, and it's called 'we hate you, please die. ↗

— Bryan Lee O'Malley

#music #scott-pilgrim #life

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterfly focused and utterfly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. ↗

— Anne Dillard

#pilgrim-at-tinker-creek #dreams

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#any #carry #city #discipline #forbidden

The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith. ↗

— Karen Armstrong

#central #essential #faith #five #islam

It certainly is the duty of every true Christian, to esteem himself a stranger and pilgrim in this world; and as bound to use earthly blessings, not as means of satisfying lust or gratifying wantonness, but of supplying his absolute wants and necessities. ↗

— Johann Arndt

#blessings #bound #certainly #christian #duty

At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming. ↗

— Lionel Blue

#classes #encountered #i #instruction #john

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists. ↗

— Anita Brookner

#happens #love #love is #most #people

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage. ↗

— Frederick Buechner

#another man #area #comes #experience #human