A Quote by Garth Nix
I certainly have had experiences of a sense of wonder at the world and a feeling that even though it could all be explained rationally, it still feels that there is more to it.
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In one sense, I have always felt glad to have had the war [World War II] in my childhood, because, as a result, nothing that has happened in the world since then has ever seemed quite so bad. On the other hand, I never entirely got over my feeling of being cheated when the promised era of peace in a wonderful "post-war world" failed to materialize. I could not understand how, after all that, people could ever even think of fighting again. And I still can't.
At no point do I ever remember taking religion very seriously or even feeling that the biblical stories were any different from fairy stories. Certainly, none of it made any sense. By comparison, the world in which I lived, though I might not always understand it in all aspects, always made a lot of sense.
The comprehensibility of the world seems to me a wonder or eternal secret. Here lies the sense of wonder which increases even more with the development of our knowledge.
I can only guess that it made the world he went back to...strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.
Honestly, I had no idea that the heart could cause such trouble and strife. It could be broken and still mend. It could be wounded and still heal. It could be given away still returned, lost and found. It could do all that and still you lived, though according to some, only just.
What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’
I suppose I could claim that I had suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already know the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now I know the truth, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world, different shoddy, but that's how it feels.
Let's say you dissolve and become infinite light. There is this sense of being light even though the mind is not thinking it, one feels it, which indicates that one is still there - at least half of one.
I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though defeated here and there; and even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things go differently from the expected, it is necessary to take heart again and new courage. For the great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.
I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be - instead of the tawdry, lousy fouled-up mess it is.
In arguing too, the parson own'd his skill, For e'en though vanquish'd he could argue still; While words of learned length and thundering sound Amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around; And still they gaz'd, and still the wonder grew That one small head could carry all he knew.
When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.
Even though it's still, annoyingly, something everybody feels the need to bring up to anybody who doesn't look like a model, there are more women now who are super successful and have different body types. You know, like men do. That feels like progress to me.
Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.
I knew what the sanctified life was not. Not a life filled with more rituals, more scrupulously observed. Not more praying. Not becoming a better person, being more charitable, more concerned with everyone else's pains. Sanctifying had something to do with a sense of constant wonder - feeling gratitude and finding significance everywhere, in every action, relationship and object.
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