Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.

I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

I can tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you.

You can safely assume you’ve created god in your own image when it turns out that god hates all the same people you do.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

No” is a complete sentence.

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.

I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

The whistle is always waiting to be blown, and in some ways, it gets me to do better work.

Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.

I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

I do not understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.

People help you or you help them and when we offer or receive help, we take in each other. And then we are saved.

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare…

Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.

I’m drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words ‘divine love’ and ‘impeachment’ in the first sentence. But I know the word ‘divine’ makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

When god is going to do something wonderful, he or she always starts with a hardship; when god is going to do something amazing, he or she starts with an impossibility.

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it…i would discover that it hadn’t washed me away.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.

Mine was a patchwork god, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, eastern and western, pagan and hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and jesus.

Expectations are resentments under construction.

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.

Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don’t be an asshole.

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.

I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I’m not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.

I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the land of the f*cked.

I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.

I smiled back at her. I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud because they would make jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.

Who was it who said that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?.

There is nothing more touching to me then a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

Some people won’t go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.

It’s so awful, attacking your child. It’s the worse thing I know, to shout loudly at this 50 lb. Being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It’s like b*tch-slapping e.t.

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.

Without using the word, everyone started forgiving each other again. Just like that, from the no of all nothingness: you have a big tense mess and out of it comes some joy. It must be magic.

Small is how blessings, healing, progress and increase occur.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

It’s a great time to be alive.

Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food.

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.

Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors.

We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.

…because when people have seen you at their worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it’s like they are holding the baby of you.

I am an Aries. Although I do not believe in astrology, I think this is exactly the right sign to have been born under.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

The reason I never give up hope is because everything is so basically hopeless.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.

Again and again I tell God I need help, and God says, ‘Well, isn’t that fabulous? Because I need help too. So you go get that old woman over there some water, and I’ll figure out what we’re going to do about your stuff.

When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.

I was reminded of the Four Immutable Laws of the Spirit: Whoever is present are the right people. Whenever it begins is the right time. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened. And when it’s over, it’s over.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of god is glue.

…most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.

Hope is not about proving anything. It’s about choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim, bleak sh*t anyone can throw at us.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

When faced with a crisis, do three things: breathe, pray and be kind.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don’t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

[her] work taught me that you could be all the traditional feminine things — a mother, a lover, a listener, a nurturer — and you could also be critically astute and radical and have a minority opinion that was profoundly moral.

Now she and I sit together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time when we both to go heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.

Hope begins in the dark.

The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.

For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

The thing about light is that it really isn’t yours; it’s what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness; if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself.

What’s the difference between you and God? God never thinks he’s you.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost – his or her wildest, most messed-up children – the way you’d ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall.

… the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That’s how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail…because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity, and modern man’s dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials.

Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

‘As I Lay Dying,’ I reread that often. That’s the first work of Faulkner’s that I read that so amazed me and that I responded to emotionally and viscerally. I admired it so much, and I think that’s why I keep rereading it.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I’ve read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation – Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos – especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.

Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

I’m bad and i’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought ‘The Fable’ was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked ‘Tender Is the Night,’ an experimental novel.

Civilization begins with distillation

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

Of course, I’m of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

Faulkner’s characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.

I’d have liked to have been another Faulkner, of course.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

I’m not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.

Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.

The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

Totalitarians always want to kill culture. But imagine life without football, Faulkner, or Bob Dylan. It’s not life.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to.

a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.

…i give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…i give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

I can’t change overnight into a serious literary author. You can’t compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat…nor make love for eight hours…

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

Once a b*tch always a b*tch, what I say.

When I was younger, people were inventing a new way of writing – James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. And I thought we had to find a structure for cinema. I fought for a radical cinema, and I continued all my life.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’re not honest

It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren’t ready for, like Faulkner’s, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

So I’m not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Don’t do what you can do – try what you can’t do.

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

Clocks slay time… Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

The saddest thing about love, joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.

The only thing permanent is change.

You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am

Reason can never prove the existence of God.

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

Always regard every man as an end in himself, and never use him merely as a means to your ends [i.e., respect that each person has a life and purpose that is their own; do not treat people as objects to be exploited].

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

Have the courage to use your own reason- that is the motto of enlightenment.
“foundations of the metaphysics of
morals” (1785).

If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.

The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.

But a lie is a lie, and in itself intrinsically evil, whether it be told with good or bad intents.

When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any

It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Dare to know! have the courage to use your own intelligence!.

Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease… and throw himself into roils and labors.

Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.

Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.

Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.

Riches ennoble a man’s circumstances, but not himself.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.

We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.

Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.

Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.

Dare to think!.

Maximum individuality within maximum community

But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

I shall never forget my mother, for it was she who planted and nurtured the first seeds of good within me. She opened my heart to the lasting impressions of nature; she awakened my understanding and extended my horizon and her percepts exerted an everlasting influence upon the course of my life.

One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.

I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.

Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

By a lie, a man… annihilates his dignity as a man.

Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

If we knew that god exists, such knowledge would make morality impossible. For, if we acted morally from fear or fright, or confident of a reward, then this would not be moral. It would be enlightened selfishness.

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).

Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.

Great minds think for themselves.

Do the right thing because it is right.

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.

Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.

The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.

Maturity is having the courage to use one’s own intelligence!

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.

Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one’s means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

How then is perfection to be sought? wherein lies our hope? in education, and in nothing else.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.

Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

[R]eason is… given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.

For peace to reign on earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.

You think you’re funny?
i think i’m adorable.

Kick it in the *ss.

He hadn’t been kissed like that in a long, long, time; maybe ever.

God save us from half the people who think they’re doing God’s work.

There ain’t no me if there ain’t no you.

Hell had been his vietnam. It had stamped its mark on him for all eternity, and no amount of denial or self-imposed ignorance was going to change it. Ever.

Fight the fairies! you fight those fairies!.

The diner, a motorcycle, and dean winchester.

Neal! it’s your grief counselors. We’re here to hug!.

Just ’cause you love someone doesn’t mean you should stick around and screw up their life.

We know a little bit about a lot of things. Just enough to make us dangerous.

Something snagged at his heart when he thought of that; he didn’t want dean to forget about him. It didn’t seem fair that dean might get to brush him aside and cas would remember him for the rest of his natural life.

Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole.

Saving people, hunting things, the family business.

Well, I think I learned a valuable lesson. Always take down your Christmas decorations after new years or you might get filleted by a hooker from God.

I’m not gonna die in a hospital where the nurses aren’t even hot.

Look, I don’t need to feel like hell for failing you, okay? For failing you like I’ve failed every other godforsaken thing that I care about! I don’t need it!

I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition.

Please accept this sandwich as a gesture of solidarity.

I’m batman.

No, he focused on the one thing that he knew would keep him grounded the way the demon said he’d need to be.
“take your brother outside as fast as you can – don’t look back. Now, dean, go!”
sam’s not dying. Not on my watch. You protect your family no matter what.
i’m coming for you, sammy. Just hold tight.
and don’t look back.
he opened his eyes. Behind him, he could hear kat’s voice muttering an incantation in a language he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t latin, certainly. Since it was demon magic, it was probably some language that was even more dead than latin.
the chanting stopped.
dean screamed.

Of course, the most troubling question is why do these people assume we’re gay?

Dad had this story. A marine and a navy guy walk into a bathroom together. They both take a piss, and then sailor goes to the sink. The marine heads for the door, and the sailor says, “hey- in the navy they teach us to wash up after we take a leak.” and the marine turns around and says, “yeah? well, in the marines they teach us not to piss on our hands.

You know, dean said, gesturing with his uninjured hand. If we were in an action movie, this would be the scene where you tenderly dress my wounds. Then the wailing guitar ballad would kick in and we’d end up rolling around on the bed in a slow motion montage.

if I were in q, the winged serpent, xochi replied, this would be the scene where I sacrifice you to quetzalcoatl.

Your half-caf, double vanilla latte is getting cold over here, francis.

I can’t believe you brought me here to see some guy who heals people out of a tent!

Hey, see if they’ve got any pie. Bring me some pie. I love me some pie.

I can dig elvis.

Dean, having worked with dad longer, was used to taking orders. More than that, he seemed to thrive on it, as if dad had crushed the independent spirit he’d been born with.

Dean, you’ve been to hell, I started the apocalypse, and we’re supposed to be possessed by an archangel and the devil. Now you’re being skeptical?.

So,” lauren said. “you help ghosts with unfulfilled wishes cross over to the astral plane for judgment.”
“yes.”
“and you hunt demons.”
“yes.”
“and you’re married to an angel.”
“yes.”
she paused. “…so basically, you’re dean winchester.”
i made an exasperated sound. “i am not.”
she smirked. “yeah, sure.

Back when he was a kid, about eleven years old, he used to go looking for cars that had “no radio in car” signs on them. He’d take a removable radio, of a type that was very popular at the time, and throw it as hard as he could at the car window with a note wrapped around it that read, now you have one.

“snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules.

I’d rather write about polar bears than people.

You do not have to be good.
you do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
you only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
meanwhile the world goes on.
meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they’re thirsty. That’s prayer. They don’t live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.

Believe me, if anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day – which is what I did.

The poet with his face in his hands

you want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

so if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

It’s very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can’t wait until morning – it’ll be gone.

Wasn’t it Emerson who said, ‘My life is for itself and not for a spectacle’? I have a happy, full, good life because I hold it private.

I go down to the shore

i go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? and the sea says
in its lovely voice:
excuse me, I have work to do.

…there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.

I don’t ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.

The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees – to learn something by being nothing

You never know / What opportunity / Is going to travel to you, / Or through you.

How I go to the woods

ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.

i don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.

besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.

if you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.

I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

Love yourself. Then forget it.
then, love the world.

You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but i’ll take it.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

It’s morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields…watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.

The uses of sorrow

(in my sleep I dreamed this poem)

someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

it took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they’re full of bicycle trails.

Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride, married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. Instructions for living a life: pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I grew up in a confused house: too much unwanted attention or none at all.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Instructions for living a life.
pay attention.
be astonished.
tell about it.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads. (from “Mysteries, Yes”)

Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, Stay awhile.

Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

I consider myself kind of a reporter – one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (don’t hesitate).

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
i was a bride married to amazement.
i was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

when it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
i don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

i don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Because of the dog’s joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn’t think of it as a career. I didn’t even think of it as a profession… It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?.

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

I would say that there exists a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves-we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together, we are each other’s destiny.

I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

The journey

one day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“mend my life!”
each voice cried.
but you didn’t stop.
you knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
it was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Live at home.

It is simply service that measures success.

No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way are revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless. Only alone can I draw close enough to God to discover His secrets.

The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible.

Learn to do the common things uncommonly well.

Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

How far you go in life depends on
your being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged,
sympathetic with the striving and
tolerant of the weak and strong.
because someday in your life
you will have been all of these.

Start where you are, with what you have. Make something of it and never be satisfied.

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.

Most people search high and wide for the key to success. If they only knew, the key to their dreams lies within.

God cannot use you as He wishes until you come into the fullness of His Glory. Do not get alarmed, my friend, when doubts creep in. That is old Satan. Pray, pray, pray.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

Human need is really a great spiritual vacuum which God seeks to fill… With one hand in the hand of a fellow man in need and the other in the hand of Christ, He could get across the vacuum.

Do what you can, with what you have and do it now!

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear from those who hate you.

Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.

Years ago I went into my laboratory and said, ‘Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what the universe was made for?’ The Great Creator answered, ‘You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask for something more your size, little man.’

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books . . .

If you love it enough, anything will talk with you.

Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.

When you do the common things in an uncommon way, you’ll command the attention of the world.

99% of failures comes from those who have a habit of making up excuses.

We have become 99 percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts.

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

Since new developments are the products of a creative mind, we must therefore stimulate and encourage that type of mind in every way possible.

We have become ninety-nine percent money mad. The method of living at home modestly and within our income, laying a little by systematically for the proverbial rainy day which is due to come, can almost be listed among the lost arts.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me.

No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.

When I was young, I said to God, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the universe.’ But God answered, ‘That knowledge is for me alone.’ So I said, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the peanut.’ Then God said, ‘Well George, that’s more nearly your size.’ And he told me.

In these strenuous times, we are likely to become morbid and look constantly on the dark side of life, and spend entirely too much time considering and brooding over what we can’t do, rather than what we can do, and instead of growing morose and despondent over opportunities either real or imaginary that are shut from us, let us rejoice at the many unexplored fields in which there is unlimited fame and fortune to the successful explorer and upon which there is no color line; simply the survival of the fittest.

As I worked on projects which fulfilled a real human need forces were working through me which amazed me. I would often go to sleep with an apparently insoluble problem. When I woke the answer was there. Why, then, should we who believe in Christ be so surprised at what God can do with a willing man in a laboratory? Some things must be baffling to the critic who has never been born again.

It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.

My prayers seem to be more of an attitude than anything else. I indulge in very little lip service, but ask the Great Creator silently, daily, and often many times a day, to permit me to speak to Him through the three great Kingdoms of the world which He has created – the animal, mineral, and vegetable Kingdoms – to understand their relations to each other, and our relations to them and to the Great God who made all of us. I ask Him daily and often momently to give me wisdom, understanding, and bodily strength to do His will; hence I am asking and receiving all the time.

Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given Him by people here and in all parts of the world. Even if we gave Him no name at all, He would still be there, within us, waiting to give us good on this earth.

When our thoughts – which bring actions – are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be.

I would never allow anyone to give me money, no difference how badly I needed it. I wanted literally to earn my living.

There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation – veneer isn’t worth anything.

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps full the dinner pail is valuable.

When you do common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

There is no short cut to acheivement.

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also – if you love them enough.

God is going to reveal to us things He never revealed before if we put our hands in His. No books ever go into my laboratory. The thing I am to do and the way of doing it are revealed to me. I never have to grope for methods. The method is revealed to me the moment I am inspired to create something new. Without God to draw aside the curtain I would be helpless.

Education, in the broadest of truest sense, will make an individual seek to help all people, regardless of race, regardless of color, regardless of condition.

From a child, I had an inordinate desire for knowledge and especially music, painting, flowers, and the sciences, Algebra being one of my favorite studies.

Faith is having a positive attitude about what you can do and not worrying at all about what you can’t do.

When we are truly confident and secure, the opinions of others cannot control us.

Character isn’t developed when we get what we want. Character is developed when we don’t get what we want.

Just because you go to church doesn’t mean you’re a christian. I can go sit in the garage all day and it doesn’t make me a car.

Happiness is not a feeling, it is a choice. To be happy, one must choose to be happy, not respond to a circumstance that now controls your happiness.

God doesn’t tell you to do hard things so he can stand back and laugh and watch you struggle. He tells you to do things the things that he knows are gonna work out to your good in the end.

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren’t happening.

No matter what’s going on in our lives, the victory is in refusing to quit.

Whatever your situation, God wants to heal you, strengthen you, and lead you to a place where you can enjoy life again.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.

Don’t be afraid of change, because it is leading you to a new beginning.

It`s important to have a relationship with God. He’s the only one that can get down inside of you and heal what needs to be healed inside.

Complain and remain. Praise and be raised.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

We are not filled with the Spirit of God to do easy things. He fills us with His Spirit so we can do impossible things.

Encourage everyone you meet with a smile or compliment. Make them feel better when you leave their presence and they will always be glad to see you coming.

Watch out for the joy-stealers: gossip, criticism, complaining, faultfinding, and a negative, judgmental attitude.

Embrace your life, count your blessings, and don’t complain about what you don’t have.

The purpose of faith isn’t always to keep us from having trouble. It is often to carry us through trouble. If we never had any trouble, we wouldn’t need any faith.

God has equipped you to handle difficult things. In fact, He has already planted the seeds of discipline and self-control inside you. You just have to water those seeds with His Word to make them grow!

Don’t let your feelings be a god to you.

Before you judge someone else, stop and think about all that God has forgiven you for.

God is the Source of real love, joy, peace, wisdom and everything else we all need to be the people He has created us to be.

Each time we cooperate with God, we take one more giant step forward. Because when God asks us to change, it means that He always has something better to give us – more freedom, greater joy, and greater blessings.

The great thing about an attitude is that it’s yours and you can change it.

Character is doing what you don’t want to do but know you should do.

If we live a self-directed, self-motivated, self-centered life, always needing to get our own way, then we’re going to be miserable. In fact, many times we believe it’s our problems that are making us unhappy when, in reality, it’s because we’re focused on ourselves!

We cannot control what others do to us, but through God we can control the way we respond to them.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.

Instead of concentrating on your problems and getting discouraged, focus on God and meditate on His promises for you. You may have fallen down, but you don’t have to stay down. God is ready, willing and able to pick you up.

The power of God is available to you today to help you do whatever you need to do and with a smile on your face!

You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.

As you read or listen to God’s Word and spend time talking to Him in prayer, your spirit will eventually become stronger than your flesh.

We suffer much agony because we try to get from people what only God can give us, which is a sense of worth and value. Look to God for what you need, not to people.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.

It is not as important how we start (our past), but how we finish.

Don’t try to change people. It won’t work, and they will end up resenting you. Only God can change people!

You have the power to make the world a better place by being kind to someone today

Patience is not the ability to wait but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.

Don’t complain. The Israelites wasted forty years murmuring and complaining in the wilderness, when they could have just obeyed God and entered into their Promised Land.

Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once to get over the fear of doing it. Twice to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.

Don’t let someone who has a bad attitude give it to you.

Don’t just learn from god’s word, but believe it will change your life.

Put your expectations on god, not on people.

Even if you think the grass is greener on the other side, you’re going to have to mow that side too.

Courage is fear that has said its prayers and decided to go forward anyway.

Your value should not be determined by how somebody else has treated you.

Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges.

Our past may explain why we’re suffering but we must not use it as an excuse to stay in bondage.

When you are tempted to give up, your breakthrough is probably just around the corner.

Don’t be afraid to step out, have dreams, have visions, have hopes and always, always, always believe in miracles.

I may not be where I need to be but I thank god I am not where I used to be.

Stop being tomented by everyone else’s reaction to you.

Getting stress out of your life takes more than prayer alone. You must take action to make changes and stop doing whatever is causing the stress. You can learn to calm down in the way you handle things.

Strive for excellence, not perfection, because we don’t live in a perfect world.

Positive minds produce positive lives. Negative minds produce negative lives. Positive thoughts are always full of faith and hope. Negative thoughts are always full of fear and doubt.

One mistake does not have to rule a person’s entire life.

Forgiveness is a CHOICE, not a feeling.

80% of people’s problems are about how they feel about themselves.

We all face storms in life. Some are more difficult than others, but we all go through trials and tribulation. That’s why we have the gift of faith.

Worry and reasoning are two of Satan’s most successful tools. He’ll get us started with one negative thought and then sit back and watch us finish ourselves off.

Stop focusing on what’s wrong with everyone else and start focusing on how blessed you are.

I want to encourage you to place yourself totally into God’s hands and allow Him to be the Manager of your life.

Every time you look in the mirror remember that God created you and that everything He creates is beautiful and good!

I have learned that I really do have discipline, self-control, and patience. But they were given to me as a seed, and it’s up to me to choose to develop them.

Spending time with God is the key to our strength and success in all areas of life. Be sure that you never try to work God into your schedule, but always work your schedule around Him.

Have god make a message out of your mess.

It is not about reading the word. It is about obeying the word.

Wisdom always waits for the right time to act, while emotion always pushes for action right now!

An affirmation to say everyday:

the healing power of god is working in me right now. Eveyr day I get better and better in every way.

Hope is favorable and confident expectation; it’s an expectant attitude that something good is going to happen and things will work out, no matter what situation we’re facing.

Prayer doesn’t just change things – it changes us. If we are diligent in seeking God, slowly and surely we become better people.

In the midst of your battles, never forget that God loves you and He has a plan for you.

Remember God is not surprised by your inabilities, your imperfections, or your faults. He has always known everything about you that you are just now finding out, and he chose you on purpose for himself.

The eagle has no fear of adversity. We need to be like the eagle and have a fearless spirit of a conqueror!

We need a backbone, not a wishbone.

Turn you situation over to God because He can do more in a moment than you can do in a lifetime.

You can suffer the pain of change or suffer remaining the way you are.

Our joy does not have to be based on our circumstances.

You can not live your life just based on what everyone else thinks.

A positive attitude gives you power over your circumstances instead of your circumstances having power over you.

Stop determining your worth and value by what other people say. Be determined by what the word of god (scriptures)says.

You will never see the end, if you give up in the middle

It’s so important to realize that every time you get upset, it drains your emotional energy. Losing your cool makes you tired. Getting angry a lot messes with your health.

Love can melt the hardest heart, heal the wounds of the broken heart and quiet the fears of the anxious heart.

[opens the window for the first time as he hears the city singing “Let it Grow” and is on the verge of tears] Thank you, Ted.

The lorax: which way does a tree fall?
the once-ler: uh, down?
the lorax: a tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.

I’m starving! What’s for breakfast? [looks into the fridge to find the big Bar-ba-loot eating entire cubes of butter] Breakfast is overrated.

Cause when a guy does something stupid once, well that’s because he’s a guy. But if he does the same stupid thing twice, that’s usually to impress some girl.

I’m Frankenstein’s head on a spider’s body!!

I’ll go strait up your nose!

Which way does a tree fall?

Audrey: [to Ted] I could just kiss you right now![Ted and Audrey lean in to kiss, only to be stopped by Ted’s mother]
Mrs. Wiggins: We don’t have time for that!Ted: I dunno, we have a little time. [Audrey and his mom stare at him] You know what? Let’s just go. Let’s go. Forget about it.

Nothing is going to change, unless someone does something soon.

My names Grammy Norma, I’m old and I’ve got gray hair and I remember when trees were everywhere, and no one had to PAY (proceeds to Grammy Norma O’Hare) for air, so I say LET IT GROW.

I’m biggering my company, I’m biggering my factory, I’m biggering my corporate sign! Everybody out there take care of yours, and me? I’ll take care of mine mine mine mine mine!

Unless someone like you cares an awful whole lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

You haven’t got the guts!

That’s a woman?

You’ve got a beautiful town here, Ted. Lots of fun stuff to occupy your short attention span. I can’t think of any reason you’d ever wanna go outside of town again. Ever.

UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, It’s not.

Did you chop down this tree?

I meant no harm I most truly did not, but I had to grow bigger so bigger I got. I biggered my factory, I biggered my roads, I biggered the wagons, I biggered the loads, of the thneeds I shipped out I was shipping them forth from the south, to the east, to the west. To the north, I went right on biggering selling more thneeds. And I biggered my money which everyone needs.

Shut Up Baby Man

This tree comes in all four seasons. Winter, summer, fall, and… disco!!(Starts dancing.)

Our research shows that people will buy ANYTHING if you put it in a plastic bottle!

It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.

[After the Lorax accuses him of harming Pipsqueak after almost hitting him with a hammer] What? No! I would never hit this little guy. You, on the other hand, I would gladly pound you and your mustache into the ground!

Come on Ted, dance with the tree!

[To Ted] Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better… it’s not.

[Ted gets pulled up by a rope and pulley to the second floor window where the Once-ler confronts him angrily.]

Once-ler: Who are you? Who are you and what are you doing here?
!

Ted: I’m Ted. I’m Ted. I can’t breathe. Are you the Once-ler?
Oh, man.

Once-ler: Didn’t you read the signs?
No one is supposed to come here. Get out of here and leave me alone! And don’t let the boot hit you on the way out.

Ted: The boot? [gets kicked by said boot from behind] Hello! Ow! Listen! People say that if someone brings you this stuff that you will tell them about trees. [gets grabbed again]
No, no, no!

Once-ler: Trees?

Ted: Yeah, real ones. You know, that grow out of the ground? [pause] Hello?

Once-ler: Sorry, it’s just… Well, I didn’t think anyone still cared about trees.

Ted: Well, that’s me. The guy who still cares. I’m here. [gets put back down] Hey! What?The

Once-ler: You wanna know about trees, about what happened to them, (and) why they’re all gone? [softly] It’s because of me.

Ted: Wait, what? [A Whisper-ma-Phone chutes down to him. He leans in to hear.]

Once-ler: (shouts) IT’S BECAUSE OF ME! [Ted coughs] And my invention, the Thneed. It was an amazing product that could do the job of a thousand.

Ted: All right. Sounds ridiculous, but I mean, that’s cool.

Once-ler: You’re darn right it was cool! [starting to explain what happened to the trees] It all started a long time ago.

Ted: Can we start not so long ago, maybe?

Once-ler: Do you want a tree?

Ted: Yes, yes.

Once-ler: Then it all started a long, LONG time ago. [scene flashes back to the Once-ler as a young man] I was a young man leaving home.

[To the Lorax] You know what? You can just shut your mustache! My conscience is clear. I have done nothing illegal. I have my rights, and I intend to keep on biggering and biggering, and turning more Truffula trees in to Thneeds. And nothing is going to stop me!

Exactly and sleeping is the body’s way of telling other people to go away!

I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!

Ted: So, anyway, let’s just say, I need a tree. Where would I go? What do I do?

Grammy Norma: Oh, then you know what?
You’d need to find the Once-ler.Ted: Th-th-the what?

Mrs. Wiggins: Mom, it’s not really the time for one of your, you know, magical fables, okay?

Grammy Norma: [laughs] That’s right, I forgot. I’m old, and can’t even remember to put my teeth in!

Mrs. Wiggins: Stand down. That’s not what I meant.

Grammy Norma: No, really, I forgot my teeth. Would you be a dear and go get them for me?

Mrs. Wiggins: [sighs] Sure, Mom.

The Once-ler: [has just been revived by the Lorax] I-I was heading into the light, and you pulled me right back, and here I am! [hugs the Lorax]
You saved my life!
The Lorax: Yeah, I did, but, you know, it’s not that big a deal.The Once-ler: It is a big deal! Look, I almost went over that waterfall! [realizes] Wait… On my bed. How did my bed get in the river?
The Lorax: Uh, about that, uh… actually, um… [mumbles] I put your bed in the water. [The Once-ler drops him in shock]

[reffering to Ted] Why is he leaving town? No one ever leaves town! See what he’s up to.

Look, everyone here needs the trees and you’re chopping them down! So, we’ve got a big problem

The Once-ler: You wanna know about trees? About what happened to them? Why they’re all gone?
(softly) It’s because of me.Ted: Wait, what?[A Whisper-ma-Phone chutes down to Ted. Ted leans in to hear.]
The Once-ler: (shouts) IT’S BECAUSE OF ME!

I’m playing poker, he’s playing gold fish, and I think he’s hungry

[when the last Truffula tree is chopped down] That’s it. The very last one. That may stop you.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

Once-ler: [has just been revived by the Lorax] I-I was heading into the light, and you pulled me right back, and here I am! [hugs the Lorax]
You saved my life!
Lorax: Yeah, I did, but you know, it’s not that big a deal.Once-ler: It is a big deal! Look, I almost went over that waterfall! [realizes] Wait… On my bed. How did my bed get in the river?
Lorax: Uh, about that, uh… actually, um… [mumbles] I put your bed in the water. [The Once-ler drops him in shock]
I didn’t mean you any harm. I just wanted to calmly float you away. Look, everyone here needs the trees and you’re chopping them down! So, we’ve got a big problem,Once-ler: [Pipsqueak nuzzling at Once-Ler’s feet, to the Lorax] All right, look. I hereby swear that I will never chop down another tree. I promise.
Lorax: [To the Once-ler]
Thank you. But I’m going to keep my eye on you.Once-ler: [After surviving the waterfall incident] Now, I’ve got a big day tomorrow, and I’m gonna get some sleep. [walks away, then comes back] Right after I find my bed.

Wow, so this is really all your fault.

I am the lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.

What I want more than anything in the whole world is to see a real living tree, growing in my backyard.

[To the Once-ler] A tree falls in the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.

I am the lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please!.

[To Ted; referring to the last Truffula seed] I know it may seem small and insignificant, but it’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become. That’s not just a seed… anymore than you’re just a boy.

Only if someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better…its not.

[when the Once-ler shows the Thneed to him; laughs] You chopped down one of my trees to make that piece of garbage?

[Comes out of the van] What a dump!

I could just kiss you right now.

[Closing How Bad Can I Be] The customers are buying, the money’s multiplying, the PR people are lying and the lawyers are denying. Who cares if a few trees are dying? This is all so gratifying! How bad, how bad can this possibly be?!

I speak for the trees!.

Why, I can’t think of any reason you’d ever want to leave town ever again.

Ted: [interrupting the story]
Hey, hey, hey. Wait a minute.The Once-ler: Excuse me?

Ted: [chuckles] Yeah. That’s awesome. You know, feeding junk food to forest animals? That’s great. But, uh, is there a musical number where you show me how to get a tree?
‘Cause I’d love to hear that one.The Once-ler: Oh, yes. Right after the musical number about the kid who kept interrupting the story and was never heard from ever again. Hmm?

Ted: Right. Got it. Proceed.

Once-ler: [To the Lorax] You know what? You can just shut your mustache! My conscience is clear. I have done nothing illegal, and I mean no harm. But I have my rights, and I intend to keep on biggering and biggering, and turning more Truffula trees in to Thneeds which everyone wants because everyone needs! [The Lorax falls backwards and hits the ground.] And nothing, no, NOTHING is going to stop me![Just then, in the distance, we hear a THWACK! The Once-ler and Lorax both look…and see the VERY LAST TRUFFULA TREE chopped down by a Super Axe-Hacker.]
Lorax: [when the last Truffula tree is chopped down] That’s it. The very last one. That may stop you.

Once-ler: [screams and wakes up, a screaming Lorax also screams and wakes up, punching his nose] Ow! Okay, what are you…? Question, what are they doing here? And follow up, if I may, what are YOU doing here?
!The
Lorax: Well, after the incident last night, we found one of your socks and came here to return it. But when we got here, you were asleep.

Once-ler: What?
Exactly. And sleeping is the body’s way of telling other people to go away.
Lorax: I know, but you looked so cozy. And it was cold outside, and we just fell asleep. No harm done.

Once-ler: “No harm done”? “No harm done”? Okay. [sees fish bathing in soap] Okay, I put my lips on those. Well, I used to, anyway. [sees a bird laying an egg] Ew. Did you just…In my bowl?
!
Lorax: [uses the Once-ler’s toothbrush to comb his mustache] Why do you even own this?
You don’t have a mustache.

Once-ler: Okay, that’s it
!
Lorax: What?
I thought we made a deal last night.

Once-ler: Yes, we did. And I said I wouldn’t chop down any more trees.
Lorax: And I said I was going to keep an eye on you. I’m starving! What’s for breakfast? [looks into the fridge to find the big Bar-ba-loot eating entire cubes of butter] Breakfast is overrated. [closes the fridge door]

Once-ler: [strains] You know what? I got work to do. [quickly changes outfit] Yep! I got to go into town and sell my Thneed
!
Lorax: [when the Once-ler shows the Thneed to him; laughs] You chopped down one of my trees to make that piece of garbage?

Once-ler: “Garbage”? Oh, no. Oh, no! You do not get it. This is a revolutionary product that will change the world as we know it. [He walks over to the Bar-ba-loots sleeping on the table and brushes them all off] It has a million uses! [He reaches under the table and pulls up Lou who is now wearing the Thneed as underwear] Look at this. It’s a swimsuit! [Then he points to the muddy animal tracks on the floor.] Mud tracked all over your floor by uninvited guests? Well, the Thneed sure comes in handy for that! [He uses it to wipe up the mud tracks] But wait, there’s more! Thanks to its all-natural microfibers, the Thneed is super-absorbent! [Then he goes to the fish swimming a glass filled with water. Shoves the Thneed into the glass. SLUUUURP! It instantly soaks up all the water, leaving the irritated fish standing in the dry glass.] It also works as a hat. [He plops the Thneed onto Lorax’s head. SPLURCH! It’s sopping wet and drips all over him. The Lorax gives the Once- ler a look]
Of course, you probably want to wring it out first.
Lorax: [He takes the Thneed off his head and throws it at the Once-ler.] Go ahead, knock yourself out. But nobody is going to buy that thing.

Once-ler: Good to know. Well, fortunately, you are not the target market, weirdo.[Once-ler strums his guitar.]
Lorax: You’re bringing a guitar?

Once-ler: Oh, yeah. I got a little jingle. I’m gonna blow some minds, gonna sell some Thneeds! [He holds up the Thneed defiantly.] Yeah. [He slams the door, waking up a Swommee-Swan, who HONKS.]

So you’re telling me you didn’t magically appear from the stump….with all the lightning and stuff

[admiring his first thneed] Now that’s a thneed! Nothing unmanly about knitting. No sir!

[uses the Once-ler’s toothbrush to comb his mustache] Why do you even own this? You don’t have a mustache.

I’m going to eat this but I am highly offended by it.

[Referring to her mural] Those are trees. Real ones. They used to grow all around here. And people said that the touch of their tufts was softer than anything, even silk. And they smelled like butterfly milk.

You listen to me, boy. Don’t go poking around in things you don’t understand, or I’ll be your worst nightmare. I’m Frankenstein’s head on a spider’s body!

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.

The Lorax: Did you chop down this tree?

The Once-ler: Uhh… No. Who did it?ǃ [gasps] What’s that? [the Lorax looks back and Once-ler drops his axe on Pipsqueak the Bar-ba-loot]
I think he did it.

The Lorax: [growls] Leave! Vacate the premises! Take your axe and get out!

The Once-ler: And who are you? [pokes the Lorax]

The Lorax: Hey, hey! I-I’m the Lorax! Guardian of the forest. I speak for the trees. [The Once-ler stares at him] So, you’re telling me, that you didn’t see me magically appear out of that stump. With all the lightning and thunder and stuff. You didn’t see any of that?

The Once-ler: No, but that sounds amazing. Can I see some of that?

The Lorax: Uhh, yeah, I could show you. But that’s not how it works.

Mrs. Wiggins: Ted, I would like you to meet Mr. O’Hare, the most powerful man in town.
Aloysius O’Hare: [Ted shocked in surprise.]
There he is! Hello, Ted.

Ted: Uh… Hi.

Mrs. Wiggins: Isn’t he clever, Mr. O’Hare?
He knows his own name and everything.
Aloysius O’Hare: You know what I would love right now, Mrs. Wiggins?
A delicious cookie. Wonderful. Teddy and I’ll stay here and talk.

Mrs. Wiggins: Sure, why don’t you go ahead and adopt him?
I’m just kidding. That was a joke. I was just joking. I’ll get your cookie.
Aloysius O’Hare: I know you have it, Ted. So, let’s put an end to this nonsense, shall we? [Ted angrily facing Mr. O’Hare]
Hand it over.

Ted: I’m sorry… I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Aloysius O’Hare: Really?
Well, then… I guess you wouldn’t mind us checking your room.

Ted: No, no, no!
Aloysius O’Hare: Morty! McGurk! Find the seed!

Ted: No, you can’t go up there! Guys, this is ridiculous. Stop! Hey! No, you can’t come in my room!
Aloysius O’Hare: Find it! [O’Hare barging into Ted’s room trying to find and destroy the Truffula seed.]
Find it!

Mrs. Wiggins: What is going on here?
Aloysius O’Hare: [to Mrs. Wiggins, after she comes up stairs and what’s going on]
THIS DOESN’T INVOLVE YOU! Get back downstairs!

Mrs. Wiggins: [to O’Hare] Excuse me, down there! I don’t care who you are, you little crazy baby-man! Get out of my house now. This is outrageous.
Aloysius O’Hare: Fine. Sorry. Must have been a misunderstanding. We’ll be leaving now. And my apologies, Ted. You be safe. [O’Hare takes the plate of cookies with Mrs. Wiggins Holding him.]

Mrs. Wiggins: Mind telling me what’s going on here?

Ted: The seed! Where is it?

Mrs. Wiggins: Seed?

Ted: Where’s Grammy?

Nice mustache.

Let it die Let it die!

Who are you and what are you doing here?!

I will see you tomorrow to tell the story!

[In deleted scene, The Man tosses the Thneed which lands on a nerdy teen girl’s head, knocking her glasses off and letting her hair down. She slowly flips her hair with the Thneed on her head as if there was supposed to be a dramatic change to her appearance.]Teen Boy: Hey. Cool hat.Teen Girl 1: Oh, my gosh. I totally want one.Teen Girl 2: That thing makes me like you more.

[After surviving the waterfall incident] Now, I’ve got a big day tomorrow, and I’m gonna get some sleep. [walks away, then comes back] Right after I find my bed.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is ever going to get better it’s not.

Oh! How nice to see someone so…unditurbed by…REALITY.

You have been warned!

Who taught you guys how to steal a bed?

Catch! calls the once-ler.
he lets something fall.
it’s a truffula seed.
it’s the last one of all!
you’re in charge of the last of the truffula seeds.
and truffula trees are what everyone needs.
plant a new truffula. Treat it with care.
give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
then the lorax
and all of his friends
may come back.

The

Lorax: [first meets Once-ler] Hey![Once-ler shrieks and falls backwards]
The

Lorax: Did you chop down this tree?

Once-ler: Uhh… No. Who did it?? [gasps] What’s that? [the Lorax looks back and Once-ler drops his axe on Pipsqueak the Bar-ba-loot]
I think he did it.

Lorax: [growls] Leave! Vacate the premises! Take your axe and get out!

Once-ler: And who are you? [pokes the Lorax]

Lorax: Hey, hey! I-I’m the Lorax, guardian of the forest. I speak for the trees. [The Once-ler stares at him] So, you’re telling me, that you didn’t see me magically appear out of that stump? With all the lightning and thunder and stuff. You didn’t see any of that?

Once-ler: No, but that sounds amazing. Can I see some of that?

Lorax: Uhh, yeah, I could show you. But that’s not how it works.

Once-ler: [condescending] Okay, um… Didn’t really happen. Oh, I know what you want! [pokes Lorax’s nose, He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Marshmallow. Holds it out.] [baby talk] I’ve got one of these for the cutest little guy I ever saw. Yummy-yummy-yummy… [The Lorax stares at the marshmallow]

Lorax: How dare you! Give me that! [He grabs the marshmallow. Sniffs it. It smells good] Mmm. I’m going to eat this, but I am highly offended by it.[He plops it into his mouth. Then makes his way over to the Once-ler’s tent-house which is being supported by stakes and ropes. Kick out a STAKE. The canvas starts to sag]

Once-ler: Whoa! What are you… Hey, Mustache! Will you stop that? [The Lorax continues circling around the tent-house pulling up stakes. He grabs his HAMMER and follows, pounding them back in.] What’s your deal, man?

Lorax: [They circle faster and faster around the tent-house, He pulling up stakes and the Once-ler pounding them back in.] Time for you to go, Beanpole!

Once-ler: Pull them right out. Just going to put them right back in. We can do this all day.[Until the Once-ler turns a corner and is about to bring his hammer down on Pipsqueak. The Lorax has placed him right where the stake would have been. The Lorax holds up his hand to stop the Once-ler]

Lorax: Stop right there! Stop it! So you would hammer one of nature’s innocent creatures?[The Lorax pats Pipsqueak on the head and he happily runs offscreen]

Once-ler: [After the Lorax accuses him of harming Pipsqueak after almost hitting him with a hammer] What? No! I would never hit this little guy. You, on the other hand, I would gladly pound you and your mustache into the ground![The Lorax turns to all of the watching animals]

Lorax: Behold! The intruder and his violent ways. [To Once-Ler] Shame on you. For shame![Once-ler drops the hammer and hides it behind his feet. Then he sees all of the animals nodding their heads in agreement. He’s had it.

Once-ler: All right, you know what? That’s it! [Points at Lorax] You listen to me, you furry meatloaf. I’m going to chop down as many trees as I need. Okay? Newsflash! Not going anywhere! End of story. [He turns and enters his cottage. His sticks his tongue out and does Raspberries to the Lorax before slamming the door behind him! He sighs heavily, shaking his head]

Lorax: Then you leave me no choice. [Startled, the Once-ler turns and sees that the Lorax is somehow inside with him. He points a threatening finger at the Once-ler and speaks in a spooky voice as if he’s casting a spell] If you’re not gone by the time the sun sets on this valley, all the forces of nature will be unleashed upon you and curse you until the end of your days! You have been warned. [Lorax turns to make a dramatic exit, but can’t reach the doorknob of Once-ler’s door. He hops a couple of times. Finally, the Once-ler lets him out.] Thanks.

Once-ler: Yeah, okay.

Lorax: You have been warned.[The Lorax storms out and slams the door, leaving the Once-ler alone in his cottage.]

But now,” says the once-ler, “now that you’re here, the word of the lorax seems perfectly clear. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

So did you sell it?

More smog in the Sky, the More they will buy!!!

The Once-ler: (starting to explain what happened to the trees) It all started a long time ago.
Ted: Can we start not so long ago, maybe?
The Once-ler: Do you want a tree?
Ted: Yes, yes.
The Once-ler: Then it all started a long, LONG, time ago.

Aunt Grizelda: [referring to the Lorax] So who invited the giant furry peanut?
The Lorax: You callin’ me a peanut, huh?
I’ll go right up your nose!Aunt Grizelda: Ha!The Once-ler: Whoa, whoa, whoa! You wouldn’t hit a woman.
The Lorax: [gasps] That’s a woman?ǃ

The Once-ler: Why are you so interested in trees, anyway? Why aren’t you like other kids? Break-dancing and wearing bell-bottoms and playing the Donkey Kongs?

Ted: [laughs]
Yeah. Right, right. I don’t know. Uh, I just thought it might be kinda cool to have one, you know.The Once-ler: [knowingly] Aaah, it’s a girl, isn’t it?

Ted: [scoffs] What?
No!The Once-ler: Really? ‘Cause when a guy does something stupid once, well, that’s because he’s a guy, but if he does the same stupid thing twice, that’s usually to impress some girl.

Ted: Hey, she is not some girlǃ
She’s a woman. In high school. And she loves trees. And I’m gonna get her one.The Once-ler: Aww. How nice to see someone so undeterred by things like reality.

Ted: (sincerely) Thank you.

[notices Pipsqueak on the Once-ler’s bed] You got to be kidding me. [to another Bar-ba-loot] Can he swim? [the Bar-ba-loot shakes his head] Of course he can’t swim! Hang on, Pipsqueak! I’m comin’ to get ya!

what i want to see more then anything is to see a real living tree

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

You’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

…his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing–these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice…. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.

But this too is true: stories can save us.

You don’t know. When i’m out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it’s like i’m full of electricity and i’m glowing in the dark – i’m on fire almost – i’m burning away into nothing – but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am.

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Well, right now i’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…i don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading. […] an old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.

He wished he could’ve explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.

I survived, but it’s not a happy ending.

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end…

It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love…it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things…i just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones — that kind of love.

Together we understood what terror was: you’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.