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"You don't know, my Charley, that right down there, in the little valley, I fished for trout with your namesake, my Uncle Charley. And over there - see where I'm pointing - my mother shot a wildcat. Straight down there, forty miles away, our family rank was - old starvation ranch. Can you see that darker place down there. Well that's a tiny canyon with a clear lovely stream bordered with wild azaleas and fringed with big oaks. And on one of those oaks my father burned his name with a hot iron together with the name of the girl he loved. In the long years the bark grew over the burn and covered it..... In spring , Charley, when the valley is carpeted with blue lupines like a flowery sea, there's the smell of heaven up here, the smell of heaven."

I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

"After you have one pitch figured out, you work on another. Eventually you put together a complete series of pitches to make a collective, massive whole"

"The discovery of a mole-sized nubbin of rock and a barely visible hairline fracture had filled me with so much energy that I knew  that I had seen a path forward for the next year. If the secret to happiness was the ability to find joy in small things that have been in front of you the entire time, then the Dawn Wall was truly the Zen-master teacher"

"Alex simply doesn't waste any energy worrying about things he can't control. Some might call this delusion, or false optimism. Some might go so far to call it reckless. Alex is the only person who I have climbed with who just calls it reality. We analysed the situations as we encountered them. Start at the beginning; see what happens. And, while we are at it we might as well have some fun"

'Every time you breathe, you exhale 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen - so many that with a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And everyone who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe a bit of you.'

Bill Bryson - The Body A Guide for Occupants

Quote from Jeanette Winterson "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal"

'That there might be a level that we can reach above the ordinary conflict is a seductive one. Yung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises - at that level there is only a winner and loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above, like seeing a storm from higher ground...... how absurd it all is - the things that mean so much, the feuds we carry, the irreconcilables'

"Two weeks after Stoner received his Bachelor of Arts Degree, Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist; and before autumn war was all over Europe.  ..............

But for Stoner the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that waited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new  wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. He saw the future in the institution to which he had committed himself and which so imperfectly understood; he conceived himself changing in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change rather than its object."