Amelia Atwater-Rhodes · 147 pages
Rating: (13.2K votes)
“Love is the strongest emotion any creature can feel except for hate, but hate can't hurt you. Love, and trust, and friendship, and all the other emotions humans value so much, are the only emotions that can bring pain. Only love can break a heart into so many pieces. ”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“Those who cannot be aggressive are hunted down while they shiver and hide because the night is dark.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“I am one of them.
I am also Rachel.
I am Risika”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“Vultures devour the fallen. Hyenas destroy the weak. Humans kill that which they fear. Survive and be strong, or die, cornered by your prey, trembling because the night is dark.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“It is a cruel thing to do, to cage such a beautiful, passionate animal as if it was only a dumb beast, but humans do so all too often. They even cage themselves, though their bars are made of society, not of steel.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“Are you a god now, Risika, deciding who is to live and who is to die?”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“Humans are often this way. They go about their lives, constantly working, complaining of boredom one minute and overwork the next. They pause only to observe the niceties of society, greeting each other with 'Good morning' while their minds are somewhere else completely.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“I fed on one of the true monsters—one of the many 'witch hunters' who interrogated and jailed the accused, seeking guilt where there was none. How humans can do such things to their fellows is beyond me. They torture, main and kill their own kind, saying it is God's will.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“I fought; I fought for the immortal soul the preachers had taught me to believe in. I do not know whether I ever believed in it—I had never seen God, and He had never spoken to me—but I fought for it anyway, and I fought for Alexander.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from In the Forests of the Night
“I realize some people might not understand why the paper bags were important. But to me, they showed that someone had taken the time to make me lunch. Someone had actually thought of me; someone cared about me.”
― Laura Schroff, quote from An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny
“I look at people in a different
perspective. I saw you differently. Shy
with a smart-ass mouth. Reserved, but you
know exactly how to cut loose. Girls like you
I have to watch out for. Girls like you are the
deadliest ones.”
― Shanora Williams, quote from Who He Is
“We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide–an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide. We are free to decide because decision “happens.” We just decide without having the faintest understanding of how we do it. In fact, it is neither voluntary nor involuntary. To “get the feel” of this relativity is to find another extraordinary transformation of our experience as a whole, which may be described in either of two ways. I feel that I am deciding everything that happens, or, I feel that everything, including my decisions, is just happening spontaneously. For a decision–the freest of my actions-just happens like hiccups inside me or like a bird singing outside me. Such a way of seeing things is vividly described by a modern Zen master, the late Sokei-an Sasaki: One day I wiped out all the notions from my mind. I gave up all desire. I discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude. I felt a little queer–as if I were being carried into something, or as if I were touching some power unknown to me … and Ztt! I entered. I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw people coming towards me, but all were the same man. All were myself! I had never known this world. I had believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never created; I was the cosmos; no individual Mr. Sasaki existed.7 It would seem, then, that to get rid of the subjective distinction between “me” and “my experience”–through seeing that my idea of myself is not myself–is to discover the actual relationship between myself and the “outside” world. The individual, on the one hand, and the world, on the other, are simply the abstract limits or terms of a concrete reality which is “between” them, as the concrete coin is “between” the abstract, Euclidean surfaces of its two sides. Similarly, the reality of all “inseparable opposites”–life and death, good and evil, pleasure and pain, gain and loss–is that “between” for which we have no words.”
― Alan W. Watts, quote from The Way of Zen
“Horses broke out last night, party must have scared them.”
― Nashoda Rose, quote from Torn from You
“I note however that this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year's diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.”
― Virginia Woolf, quote from A Writer's Diary
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