When you love someone you do not love them, all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.
At that instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?
My love is of a birth as rare As 'tis, for object, strange and high; It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.
For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.
So many of the stories are about perspective and viewpoint. It's not just about seeing and revelation. The idea of having many different stories from many different perspectives has something to do with me trying to deal with the impossibility of having a wide enough view to say anything really convincing on that scale.
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
Whatever bliss we think we're going to find, we may find it in brief flashes, fleeting moments that come and go. There's an impossibility to nailing down any good feeling.
I met soldiers coming back from war and I was impressed by their description of PTSD, all the symptoms: the outburst of violence, the impossibility to cope with reality anymore, all that stuff.
If my pictures are about anything at all, I think it's about trying to make a connection in the world. I see them as more optimistic in a certain way. Even though it's very clear there's a level of sadness and disconnection, I think that they're really about trying to make a connection and almost the impossibility of doing so.
If defamation of religion was illegal it would be a crime for me to say that the notion of transubstantiation is so ridiculous that even a small child should be able to see the insanity and utter physical impossibility of a piece of bread and some wine somehow taking on corporeal form.
The largest ambition has the least appearance of ambition when it meets with an absolute impossibility in compassing its object.
It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.
There's not much to be done about the impossibility. One must instead get rid of the desire.
Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
Every great moment of social change was once a confirmed impossibility. People's determination in the face of overwhelming odds has, time and again, triumphed over what seems impossible. This is what you tell yourself.
For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.
I was about 12 or 13 years old. I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend ,just as if it were a novel, very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it - the whole thing shocked me profoundly.
I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there's always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense... This is what drives you to the next picture.
Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.
They have no idea that it can be done by a bus driver, a field hand, or a fry cook. They have no idea where it comes from. It comes from pain, damnation and impossibility. The blow to the soul of the gut. It comes from getting burned and seared and slugged. It comes from...new and awful places and the same old places.
A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
I think it's just recognizing that who you are is not any of the stuff that you have. It's not any of the things of the ego. Coming to that awareness is a very hard thing for most people to do - but that's an excuse. If you tell yourself it's too hard, then you won't take it on. But right now, for most people, it's almost an impossibility to do so, because they're so attached to "I am what I have"; "I am what I do"; "I am what my reputation is"; or "I am all of this material stuff."
In this world, unity is achievable only by learning to unite in spite of differences, rather than insisting on unity without differences. For their total eradication is an impossibility. The secret of attaining peace in life is tolerance of disturbance of the peace. (p. 99)
Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.
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