I resist what I cannot change
Own it in your own way
I wanna find what can't be found

Pain, The War on Drugs

He took comfort in knowing that the world would carry on without him-and, in fact, already had.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life … that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Our history is as much a product of torsion and stress as it is of unilinear drive. It is amusing that at any given point of time we haven't the slightest idea of what is happening to us. The present wars and ideological changes of nervousness and fighting seem to have direction, but in a hundred years it is more than possible it will be seen that the direction was quite different from the one we supposed.The limitation of the seeing point in time, as well as in space, is a warping lens.

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad.

Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

Consider frequently how swiftly things that exist or are coming into existence are swept by and carried away. Their substance is as a river perpetually flowing; their actions are in continual change, and their causes subject to ten thousand alterations. Scarcely anything is stable, and the vast eternities of past and future in which all things are swallowed up are close upon us on both hands. Is he not then a fool who is puffed up with success in the things of this world, or is distracted, or worried, as if he were in a time of trouble likely to endure for long.


Marcus Aurelius, Meditations  (V,23)

Most worldly affairs are performed by themselves.

Montaigne

The wind is blowing; adore the wind.

From the Pythagorean symbola

Man is a small kosmos.

Democritus, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

Narrative is a lie... it sustains its power from a quite illogical juxtaposition of events, and perceived chain of causality- it is simply seditious, and cannot be trusted!

Chris Deliso, in the yet unpublished Third Emperor of California

I have a soul free and entirely its own, and accustomed to guide itself after its own fashion; having hitherto never had either master or governor imposed upon me: I have walked as far as I would, and at the pace that best pleased myself; this is it that has rendered me unfit for the service of others, and has made me of no use to any one but myself.

Michel de Montaigne

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. 

Philip Larkin, The Old Fools

At the end we dream of the beginning.

James Church, The Man with the Baltic Stare

For every downhill,
the deeper the easier,
there is an uphill,
the steeper the harder.

A Lesson From Biking