#ate

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#others #society #state #life

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrased and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#irony #life #life

Life is made up of chances to make choices, decisions of what you wish to do; the accumulated result of those choices is what you call your life. ↗

— Steven Redhead

#chances #choices #decisions #life #results

And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#endeavors #greed #humanity #ladder #learning

Water is nothing if not ingemination, an encore to the tenacity of life. ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#water #life

When I was younger I used to be devastated if I would lose. ↗

— Kim Clijsters

#i #lose #used #would #younger

Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition. ↗

— Florida Scott-Maxwell

#better #container #destroys #does #else

I don't think we'll solve the problem of the deficit until three things happen: We need more discipline on spending in Congress. We need a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget. And we need to give our presidents a line-item veto. ↗

— Ronald Reagan

#life

Whatever happened next, good or bad, it would be wonderful finding out. ↗

— Kate Griffin

#adventure #kate-griffin #life #life

It was an alien place, as much inhuman as it was ungodly. There was no life in this place. It was a different world altogether. This world was dead. ↗

— Angelo Tsanatelis

#fantasy-fiction #median-kingdom #life