So that’s how we live our lives

"Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.


--Nick Flynn

"wow, that's big"

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of
the word "Infinite".
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some.
Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a
totally stunning size, "wow, that's big", time. Infinity is just so
big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy.
Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly
huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."


— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

It's a question of survival

"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."

Desmond Morris

choose your coffee and define yourself

“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self - Tall - Decaf - Cappuccino.”


---You've Got Mail
--1998

The Men Who Stare at Goats

“Your life is like a river. If you’re aiming for a goal that isn't your destiny, you will always be swimming against the current. Young Gandhi wants to be a stock car racer? Not gonna happen. Little Anne Frank wants to be a high school teacher? Tough Anne. That's not your destiny. But you will go on to move the hearts and minds of millions. Find out what your destiny is and the river will carry you. Sometimes events in life give an individual clues as to where their destiny lies."


--The Men Who Stare at Goats
--2009

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed

The rain, it falls. The sun, it shines. The wind blows. And that’s what it’s like. You’re buffeted by this, by that, and it is nothing to do with you. Someone you love dies, or leaves. You get ill or you get better. You grow old and you remember, or you forget. And all the time, everywhere, there is this canopy stretching over you.
What canopy?
Things-as-they-are. Fate. Fate. Impersonal. Irrational. Disinterested. The rain falls. The sun shines. The wind blows. A bus mounts a pavement and kills a child. ...
I believe in no systems, no ideologies, no religion, nothing like that. I simply think – Oh, it’s very very boring, this. Very – I just think that from time to time, and at random, you are visited by what you cannot know cannot predict cannot control cannot change cannot understand and cannot cannot cannot escape – Fate. Why not? ‘S good old word.


--The Singing Detective
--Dennis Potter

Person in light of own individuality

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”





“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”


--E.E.Cummings