#fall

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that's it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I'd loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines. The only certainty was my death. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#death #falling #featureless #labyrinth #nothing

Now for my pains, promise me-“ And she hesitated. “What?” asked Marius. “Promise me!” “I promise you.” “Promise to kiss me on the forehead when I’m dead. I’ll feel it.” She let her head fall back on Marius’s knees and her eyelids closed. He thought the poor soul had gone. Eponine lay motionless, but just when Marius supposed her forever asleep, she slowly opened her eyes, revealing the somber depths of death, and said to him in an accent whose sweetness already seemed to come from another world, “And then, do you know, Monsieur Marius, I believe I was a little in love with you.” She tried to smile again and died. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#death #eponine #marius #death

In such a beast as this..." (he means the army)"...it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of bravery or even strength, and once it was down it was finished as a battle. ↗

— Paul Hoffman

#battle #beast #bravery #collaps #collective

Lily closed her eyes and screamed at the top of her lungs as she made the scariest fall of her life, plunging to her certain death while clinging to her rescuer who really didn’t rescue her at all. ↗

— Missy Lyons

#aliens #falling #rescue #rescues #death

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#argumentation #fallacy #journalism #leftism #design

A visitor asked Lincoln what good news he could take home from an audience with the august executive. The president spun a story about a machine that baffled a chess champion by beating him thrice. The stunned champ cried while inspecting the machine, "There's a man in there!"Lincoln's good news, he confided from the heights of leadership, was that there was in fact a man in there. ↗

— Shelby Foote

#fallibility #humility #leadership #home

Do you have a lot of other profound thoughts like that? Blood is blood? A toaster is a toaster? A Gelatinous Cube is a Gelatinous Cube? ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#simon-lewis #blood

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#family #girl #love #man #family

The goal of all learning is to repair the ruin of our first parents. ↗

— John Milton

#fall #sin #education

Pour grands que soient les rois, ils sont ce que nous sommes: Ils peuvent se tromper comme les autres hommes. ↗