continuity

All continuous suffering, is self inflicted.

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

Keep away from the kinship of the individuals who continually ask and examine the imperfections of others.

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

There is in certain ancient things a traceOf some dim essence --More than form or weight;A tenuous aether, indeterminate,Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.A faint, veiled sign of continuitiesThat outward eyes can never quite descry;Of locked dimensions harboring years gone by,And out of reach except for hidden keys.

It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters.

I guess she was a life line Sewing our family fabric togetherFrom me to dad to herGave me a sense of continuity Especially when my daughter was bornAs she was slipping away

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination _ through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.

Time after time during the next six months, he would put me together again.

History has always been violent, unstoppable and bound to happen; either with or without you. Acknowledge it.

The arts are the best Time Machine we have." C. S. Lewis

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.

He had been around politicians for a long time, and he was prepared for some outburst.

He was trying to find his footing in a world both familiar and foreign

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon