`The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
`Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely - but eventually be able to say, ‘All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.
`By throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. … I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.
`Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.
A Thousand Splendid Suns beauty:
`She was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings.
`One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
`Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly
The Kite Runner gold:
`For you... a thousand times over.
`And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
`She said, 'I'm so afraid.' And I said, 'why?,' and she said, 'Because I'm so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.' I asked her why and she said, 'They only let you be this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.
The thing I love about reading is just trying to figure out how these characters that you become totally immersed in, will end up. What will happen to them? What will happen to you in your own story? These three books have just completely opened up my eyes to not only what's happening in Afghanistan or their history, or the thoughts of a lovely, clever man on his death bed, but just about stuff.
I enjoy new perspectives, and especially when it can be a perspective of a thousand miles away and you still relate to the feelings of those people, you still can imagine yourself in their shoes and dealing with those situations. The last two do make you realise how incredibly lucky you are to end up in the life that you have ended up in, in the body you're in, with the looks you have, with the family & friends that you have somehow managed to find a connection with, with a healthy mind & the interest of learning new things, with access to resources that enable you to do so.
Being born the person you are is not simply a blessing or an act of a higher power, it is luck and with your own faith about other humans and the world you are born into, it is YOUR life to mould and shape and make rules for. You make the rules for your own existence, you cannot read scriptures, or the word of someone you've never met and take it for Gospel, assuming that in a Modern age that occurrences that may or may not have happened thousands of years ago could possibly work in full, right now in the time we are living in.
Whether you're Catholic, Sunni or Shia Muslim, Protestant, Jew or just a curious person who wants to learn and debate things with themselves, then read Christopher Hitchen's 'God is Not Great', he is an incredible writer & debater and is so clever, and very very open minded and accepting of other people's beliefs, with the hope of others being accepting of him. Oh, what a wonderful world it would be!
I have to go watch the IT crowd and go to sleepies!
