A Quote by Jack Henry Abbott
When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.
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Life is still as never was,
One Seems dead yet still is alive.
Man frets for things, things he can buy,
All's for sale but not life.
Life is there when a friend is there,
A friend like you worth more than life.
Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.
But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.
Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, “It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.
I don't talk about these things if I haven't lived them, and I've hurt people in my life. It's something I still have to think about when I sleep at night.
There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.
Life experience. I can talk it up, vow to broaden my horizons, but I’m still limited to the experiences with my life. How can a person understand an experience that lies completely outside her own? She can see it, feel it, imagine what it would be like to live it, but it’s no different from seeing a movie on a screen and saying, “Thank God that’s not me”.
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
I think the recording industry is founded on that principle: to approximate the live experience, to approximate that thing that evaporates as it's happening, disappears as it's happening.
Movies by Carlos Saura and others had ghosts, memories from the past, that they used to make a political point. Things you couldn't talk about openly, you could speak of through ghosts.
Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself.
I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.
Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches
Death is not the end, but the beginning of a new life. Yes, it is an end of something that is already dead. It is also a crescendo of what we call life, although very few know what life is. They live, but they live in such ignorance that they never encounter their own life. And it is impossible for these people to know their own death, because death is the ultimate experience of this life, and the beginning experience of another. Death is the door between two lives; one is left behind, one is waiting ahead.
The alchemist was dazed and dumbfounded, as the true meaning of the magic was revealed: *The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again*. The dead had, after all, risen. From dead and dry things there was growth, and new life everywhere. And the endlessly long winter had at last turned to spring. From life to death and back again to life. It was indeed the greatest magic in the world.
There is a still point in eternity. There is a still point where all things intersect. There is a still point beyond life, time, and death. Your experience of the still point is enlightenment.
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