Prometheus Unbound

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

the world is mine

The woman I love... burns with jealousy, leaps to conclusions, cries and turns to ice. But when she laughs, the world is mine.

- Maison Ikkoku

how soon is now

Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.

- David Grayson

the path of honor

A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man's life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.

- A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

neglectful friends

It isn't that I forget. But at a certain point the memory of a person stops accompanying me wherever I go. It stays behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?

- The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (modified quote)

paradise lost

Was there a part of the soul that reached out, somehow, towards possibilities barely missed, futures that would never be, because of such a little distance in a forest at night?

- Flidais in The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

i must confess

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.

- Gordie Lachance in The Body [Different Seasons] by Stephen King

heartsbane

What is a person who moves through his days as he has always moved, who speaks and walks and labours, eats, makes love, sleeps, sometimes even finds access to laughter, but whose heart has been cut out from his living body? Leaving no scar at all to be seen. No wound by which to remember the sliding blade.

- Dianora in Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

the grace of God

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

- 1 Corinthians 15:10

the curse of Sisyphus

I fear as I always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made.

- Rowan Mayfair in Taltos by Anne Rice

heart and stone

You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; you are manifestly an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.

- 2 Corinthians 3:2-3

the anatomy of pain

Pain, you just have to ride it out, hope it goes away on its own, hope the wound that caused it heals. There are no solutions, no easy answers, you just breath deep and wait for it to subside. Most of the time pain can be managed but sometimes the pain gets you where you least expect it. Hits way below the belt and doesn't let up. Pain, you just have to fight through, because the truth is you can't outrun it and life always makes more.

- Meredith Grey in Grey's Anatomy

memory versus recollection

One may be born with the potential for a prodigious memory, but one is not born with a disposition to recollect; this comes only with changes and separations in life – separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved...

Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the place where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place, or the life, we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed.

- An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

here and now

If friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we have finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our brotherhood. Overcome space, and all we have left is here. Overcome time, and all we have left is now. And in the middle of here and now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?

- Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

the way of all flesh

Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months is with Thee, and Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass...

- Job 14:5