“The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control your self. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes.”
— Stranger in a Strange Land
“See the TURTLE of enourmous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind.
On his back all vows are made;
He sees the truth but mayn’t aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me.”
— The Wastelands
Sometimes, I look around and wonder why I live where I do. It seems like the wrong time zone, given my night-owl nature, but it’s also the wrong temperature zone.
I do not do well with extremes, and yet, that is what I have. While not as hot as some areas, our summers are very hot. While not as cold as some areas, our winters are very cold. It’s only in the spring that I can say I find the temperature tolerable, much less enjoyable.
When I stack time zone and temperature against friends and family, however, moving never seems worth it. They are entirely different sorts of comfort, but the latter is certainly more important. I could not move so far away, I think, without taking everyone with me. As that does not appear likely, I’ll just have to deal with the rest.
And make sure I have enough blankets and fans.
“Music soft and soothing as a waterfall… music that coaxed my unwilling soul back up into the light with its sweet, unspoken promise.
Trust me, follow me, let me show you the way to her side.
I believed in the music… I followed it without question.
And when I woke in the greyness of my tent with only Darius beside me, I wept at the cruelty of its fiendish deception.”
— Phantom
“Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be ’someone,’ like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar.”
— The Phantom of the Opera
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven’t read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. |
“The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are dealing with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”
— Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency