Cashier: “$16.25.”
(CASH REGISTER RINGS)
Cashier: “Thanks.”
Emmanuel: “Can I ask you something?”
Cashier: “Sure.”
Emmanuel: “It's kind of a personal question.”
Cashier: “Okay.”
Emmanuel: “Do you mind?”
Cashier: “No, not at all.”
Emmanuel: “Sometimes, when I'm on my own, I imagine myself dying. Life pouring out of me like an open tap. Creates this river of my blood. My question is, have you ever noticed me float by?”
Cashier: “No. I haven't.”

The kind of language that is like ivy climbing up the walls of a crumbling but perenial castle – messy, flawed and also alive and green and always striving while the castle it climbs stays the same, defends itself from change.

haruki murakami

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”

"Make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.  And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.” 

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.” 

“I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.” 

“Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.” 

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.” 

“So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. 

“A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.” 

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire...the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves. - C.S. Lewis

Alphabet Rising

On finding himself in a dim, open plan bar that felt like it was at the edge of the world, a traveler makes a half-hearted attempt to speak to the people lined up on bar-stools. Predictably he fails to find enough commonality to warrant any communication further than the faintest show of acknowledgement. The traveler then wanders tentatively away, looks around and notices a bookshelf. He moves toward it, attracted by the familiarity – the lingua franca of books. He reads the spines, finds a book by an author that he knows and begins, indecisively, to pull at it but, before it reaches his hands, the bookshelf opens – the bookshelf was a door and the book he chose was its key. The traveller found it a little clichéd that a bookshelf served a duel role as a secret door and he found that this cliché was just as reassuring as it was tedious.

No one else in the bar seemed to care about the door any-more than they cared about him. He walked through it more out of boredom than curiosity. There was a corridor on the other side that reminded him of a corridor in an Egyptian tomb, not that he had first hand experience of corridors in Egyptian tombs. He couldn’t see far in front of him, the only light came from the bar through the, still ajar, bookshelf. He walked down the corridor for a while. What began as a light wind slowly turned into sharper, colder wind. He glanced behind him, the sole light source was now a distant pin-prick but his eyes adjusted as if he were a nocturnal animal. As the wind began to screech faintly and to howl he began regretting his decision to leave the bar, he was becoming increasingly anxious and so he decided to turn back.

He could no longer see the entrance and when he looked up at the walls of the corridor he found that they were made of randomly arranged letters of the alphabet rising up as far as his eyes could see, his heart began beating faster; the distant screech of the wind was mixed with the close, hunted animal sound of his own breathing.