Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?



--Langston Hughes

"You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing."

‎"I'd lost my closest friends in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You are here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and reasons for loving them."

--Shantaram

"But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly"

"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight--isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you KNOW that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this".

--Jonathan Franzen
--The Corrections

I said no when I should have said yes

"How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes."

---Jonathan Franzen

...

"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get."

Show an affirming flame

"Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it."


— C.S. Lewis

I am that I am

This was our first,remote contact with the Plan.I could easily be somewhere else now if I hadn't been in Belbo's office that day.I could be- who knows?-selling sesame seeds in Samarkand,or editing a series if books in Braille,or heading the First Nantional Bank of Franz Josef Land
Counterfactual conditionals are always true,because the premise is false.But I was there that day,so now I am where I am.


--Umberto Eco