The lead-gray sky of the previous afternoon, which had looked as flat and uniform as a freshly painted surface, was deteriorating. Curls of clouds peeled back, revealing darker masses, and beards of mist hung like tattered cobwebs from a crumbling ceiling.





I miss Matchbox Twenty O:








Day 146
If your star falls down, you will find mine lying beside yours.



Ahahaha I'm such a stalker I have all 5 of their albums.








Outside, the world smelled of rain.













You have a streak of thoughtlessness which is worse than deliberate malice.










































I'd rather Bellatrix than Ginny :X








It wasn't a dream a corner of his mind supplied, not a dream, real, real, real.



And he was laughing, because he had won, and he had survived. Not unscathed, but no longer broken.








Potter fans. Neville Draco 8D














Saigo no Getsuga Tensho; Mugetsu.




When I get my own house, I will rig speakers throughout my house and blast this track through them all day. Even making a sandwich will be epic.







http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XYKUeZQbMF0

Two Steps From Hell

This; amazing.



Because here was proof that the world had not gone completely mad.



All kinds of unpleasant things saturated through his pronouncement.



I know it’s supposed to be epic. But all I see is him putting an ‘L’ sign on his forehead and shouting “LOSER” to all those koltar. I think it's what Shiro Fujimoto fans do. Adoration yo.

Smite them that they never shall rise again.

SOPA and PIPA are symptoms of a larger issue. They are misguided solutions to a misunderstood problem. In the U.S. and abroad, legislators and big media are embracing censorship and sacrificing civil liberties in their attacks on free knowledge and an open Internet.







You say that only a fool believes that everyone has some good in their heart.

I am that fool. And I will die fighting.

The [CENSORED BY SOPA/PIPA]

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet.



It was novel for him to realize that such a smile might actually be for him.




Day 145
That's why I think you're incredible. No matter how many times the world steps on you, you're still you.





At night, millions of tiny fairy lights twinkled along the glass, reflecting back and looking like a million twinkling stars.



Joy burst through him in a wave of glittering bliss and it made the grin that wanted to break out across his face difficult to control.



Assassin's Creed. Seriously though, professional cosplayers ftw.




























Checkers!!



I NEED THIS.


















Falling In - Lifehouse.














I see Felton in the making!








HEEHEE Potter fans!








May Ning!!! This is for you yo!


















I don't want to die
But I ain't keen on living either
Before I fall in love
I'm preparing to leave her
I scare myself to death
That's why I keep on running



Day 144
I promise I shall never give up. & that I'll die yelling and laughing _ Jack Kerouac



I SWEAR.



The fire that sprang to life within him then—bursting through him, searing his veins from the inside out, charring his hope—decided him on his course of action, too.



You were right. What he wants most is freedom, and this is a tiny piece of freedom in a world far too crowded and mad for him most of the time.



So many people said your name like a talisman. They thought it would protect them. But a lot of them died anyway.





Because the ignoble truth, when it came down to things, was that the living were really more important to him than the dead, that's why.



I think wards freeze time for people. They don't realize that the rest of the world has moved on.



We're going to watch the stars together, and you're going to like it, not because it's with me. But because everything's better after midnight.



Even if we survive this, it will always stick in your mind. And to be completely honest, it won't get easier the older you get.

Crash Point: Berlin, 2009. Co-pilots, coughcough.



When one balances the supreme importance we attach to our concerns against the fact that we are all destined to an absurdly short lifespan, we appear to be mildly ridiculous.

Auberon Waugh.





But we both remember, how it was when we peered out the high square windows stained by grime and marked by water spots, how he leaned on the vermillion gate, staring out at the secluded lane flanked by great willows.



He leaned against the door of his house with his heart roaring in his ears like a thunderstorm.



I may be a little bit in love with you. Maybe.



Inter vivos is Latin for "between the living," and also describes a kind of legal trust in which property is given to another person while the owner is still alive, as well as living organ donation.



So they woke in the morning, with the evidence of burning behind them, and the light of sunrise before them.



So he could see, without being greedy to possess what he looked at; and he could understand, without approving.



The sound of the door slamming behind him echoed in his bones, and then his heart, and then his soul.



I resent your reality and replace it with my own. Deal with it.



The restlessness would have bothered you, naturally, ordinarily, since you were raised in an atmosphere of sedate stillness for the most time.



There's a moment in time and it's stuck in my mind.

You lay down the memo and stare out the window at the falling rain, but it isn't the rain you're seeing now. It's one of those moments.

He moved around the room, book in hand, humming a snatch of old music under his breath. He'd paused in front of the window (to sit in that rocking chair, an alexandrite green you took a liking to over the years), a slant of sunlight making his hair shine until you had to blink and squint to go on looking at him, then laughed aloud at those yellowed pages you don't remember cradling (like he was, then).You had paused and looked at him, in astonishment, and then in fondness. Once, he never would have laughed like that at a book with someone else in the room. They might have thought it was undignified, and he could never bear to look undignified. But now he laughed and laughed and leaned back in his seat, and the light shone on his face.

You had realized how happy you were—not joyful all the time, not deliriously in love, but settled and content, with your happiness purring in the back of your mind like a banked fire.

It's that moment that's stuck in your mind.




He was flying or falling or leaping when he spoke and showed his true emotions, and, family or not, he was simply not used to being surrounded with so much truth.



His mood had changed again, to a quiet, floating unreality that was even better, in some ways, than the anger. Maybe he had a real chance to think now.



The words drifted like ashes away from his lips, as light and as empty.



But those who watch don't know, don't know how the nightmares come back and crouch on his chest and make him feel like he couldn't breathe.



Obssession. It was the sort of emotion that refashioned the world around it, so that people became helpful or irritating or stupid or beautiful simply because of where they stood in relation to the perceiver.



(Lily-green, but he would not think of that).



The truth doesn't turn our unhappy endings into happy ones any more than English or Latin does. You have to believe it, to keep it, to tell it.



After hours of thought, only one plan was clear in his head, fluttering brilliant wings and bouncing up and down.



And the world changed for him as inevitably and suddenly as though the walls of his room had fallen in on his head.




(Lily. His life had been a temple of mourning for her, and always would be).



We rose, and rose, and rose, breaking through the low-lying clouds. We opened our eyes, and the blue stretched ahead of us in an endless dazzle, turned to blade-like beauty by the mid-afternoon rays of the sun.

One day, we'll go flying. Together.



And maybe it would be better to have nothing at all than too little.



It was a mystery. And he did not like mysteries unless he caused them.



"You were asleep at the time."
"Yes, yes, I was. I'm asleep all the time, or I was until you entered my life."



Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk…



But they're there, and they're dramatic, and they don't follow the slow growth we went through. The world broke for each of us, and we fell through the cracks together.



He wraps himself in light and cloth, in grandeur and beauty. That's his way of mourning.



He didn't really understand the little things, either. He didn't understand that sometimes love was one of the ephemera, fleeting and melting from one day to the next.



Day 141
Even if the waters are a torrent, we intend to swim them. Together.



You will learn the joy that comes from seeing plans unfold—Oh, that I know.
—and the joy that comes from seeing the quiet dance of society go on around you, ordered and neat, precise as the small clockwork of a watch, and beautiful as the uncontrolled chaos that you have connected yourself with never can be.





Clowns to the left, jokers to the right! Here I am, stuck in the middle with you...





Day 140
Tilt your head back, stare at the clouds, and know that you were never thrown away.

(Apologies if you were waiting for the day diary, I lost inspiration for a while there.)



The hurt wells up, so that when you least expect it, it's able to escape from your clutches, drip by drip.





She's so hard to hold, but I can't let go.



It has suddenly occurred to me that the life-debt Harry owed Narcissa when she pretended he died from the Killing Curse Voldemort cast, in the Forbidden Forest, was repaid when he went back for Malfoy in the Fiendfyre. OHMYGOD THAT IS SO COOL.



Seeing his own difficult self-knowledge reflected and accepted in another's face made him feel as if he'd stepped out of a box he hadn't even known was there, and now he could see the stars.



A thin drizzle began to mute the landscape, and the wind swirled around them, making sounds like a thousand murmurs, filling the air with soft whispers. It had been a torturing, drawn-out fairy tale that had gone on for too long and with too little words, but ultimately, there was no need for theatrical white horses, no dramatic declarations of romance, just this blind, almost fanatical devotion-
This is true love, rare, undiluted and unstoppable.
we are given two hands to hold-
two legs to walk-
two eyes to see-
two ears to listen-
but only one heart-
because the other one was given to someone for us to find.



He had pasted a crumbling smile on his lips while everyone around him tried to cheer him up. He had joked feebly along with them, while inside he disintegrated and died, trapped within his clear plastic bubble of a world, separated and disconnected from the events around him.

the way he left teardrops everywhere-



Feather by feather
the goose is plucked.
- Scottish proverb

I realise this is rather morbid to be included in the flying-collection but hey this is cool!



A quick jab with a wand in the middle of a busy street and a whispered Avada Kedavra and it will be over for Harry Potter with none the wiser. Frankly, I often wonder why Voldemort never thought of that. Had he intended to glorify the matter by doing it in front of all his followers? It wasn't so much a show when he did it in the Forest anyway. Dumb, noseless, git.



Call it appalling ignorance if you wish. I've only just learnt that Khalil Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.



Heaven's gates won't open up for me
With these broken wings I'm fallin'
And all I see is you.
-Nickelback – Savin' Me



Yes, this is a collection for you, who understood what it meant to fly. Flying is important, and you knew that. I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am.



I might have been born in a hovel,
but I determined to travel
with the wind and the stars.
-Jackie Cochran



In our dreams we are able to fly...
and that is a remembering
of how we were meant to be.
-Madeleine L'Engle



No one regards what is before his feet;
We all gaze at the stars
-Quintus Ennius



And if you can see this, I want to tell you that V is for vertigo.





All the objections were still strong and valid. None of them mattered a whit in that moment, with the sunlight from the window open to the gardens falling over them.



No matter what it is, we'll be all right.




The night spun around him, purple and silver. His heart had turned over like a broken eggshell upended. Joy unfurled dragon wings in his chest and hooked claws into him. The music of the wedding had become a single voice singing in his ears, high and piercingly sweet.
He laughed.

There was a flash of delight, irrational as all delight were, in knowing that brilliant sound was still enough to surprise him. It didn't matter that he hadn't had anything to drink that night, irreverent giggles continued to bubble up his throat.

And he laughed, because he could. The moon floated over a much brighter and bigger world now. Everything, had changed.

Grass rustled beneath their feet as they ran. He thought he could still see some traces of lighting sunshine on the horizon; this was the longest day of the year, after all. And because the moon and stars insisted on glowing overhead, they ran through three different kinds of light.

Joy made him run. Joy made him feel the hand in his as if it could lead him into eternal happiness. Joy blazed and sang and thrummed in him like a flight of hummingbirds. And beside him, he laughed, surprise and wonder and hunger for the future in his voice.

Sometimes, they do.




In that short span of seconds; Oh, god, he was home.



Discombobulated.



HOLY MOLY.



Holy moly the kids at the end: YOUUUU- SNEAKY MOM!!



I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words that laid the foundation. It was too long ago. I was in the middle of it before I knew I had begun.

darcydarcydarcydarcydarcydarcy ><







Someone has stolen the music from the rain. Now it's just a distant noise. Playing for you. An audience of one.









"What type of building is this? Why would you hide all the beautiful things inside where no one can see them? From the outside, all I see is pipes and bricks, broken and rusted scaffolding, dirt and grime. No one would want to enter this place."


"Because I live inside. And other people, live outside."



Neil Gaiman.



I need to hold on to you; I just can't let you go.

And it makes no senseeeeee

Perfect World, Simple Plan.



(I've been MIA for so long D: )




Day 139
Now here is nowhere.

(But that's okay, because you won't need here when I'm there.)







I can’t cry anymore. I’m empty. I’m drained. And I can’t move. Not that I’d want to.

Because that’s the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. It becomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lunks. I want to nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in its arms and not wake up for a long, long time. When you’re asleep, no one asks you to do anything. No one expects anything of you. And you don’t have to face any of your troubles.

— Stephanie Perkins

thanks to wannon.





The Illumination, by David Brockmeier


The world had changed in the wake of the Illumination. No one could disguise his pain anymore. You could hardly step out in public without noticing the white blaze of someone’s impacted heel showing through her slingbacks; and over there, hailing a taxi, a woman with shimmering pressure marks where her pants cut into her gut; and behind her, beneath the awning of the flower shop, a man lit all over in a glory of leukemia.

***

An interesting thing happens when reading Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination: you quickly become lost in the painterly way he covers his world in light; using thin needlework stitching, thick roll-on strokes, or igniting someone’s skeleton in a million points of the brightest white imaginable, their core shining through their skin as if stripped clean of their top layer, Brockmeier deceives the reader in a subtle, but immensely affecting way. After so many pages of lovingly constructed imagery you realize, as I’m sure he intended, that you’ve been deriving pleasure from nothing less than the agony and suffering of others—revelling in the one-of-a-kind beauty of experience that is found only through pain, described with carefully constructed and moving use of metaphor.

Adopting a structure similar to David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, The Illumination is a novel told in six modestly connected parts. At exactly 8:17 one Friday night, every wound, every sore, every broken or damaged part of every broken and damaged human on the planet begins to shine from within with a luminous white light. In that instant, all the pain we’ve worked so hard to keep to ourselves—all the agonies, large and small, we fight to bury and repress—is made visible, as obvious as the stars in the night sky. Pain, a constant in everyone’s life to varying degrees, becomes a measurable quantity in the eyes of others.

Structured loosely around a journal of love notes from a husband to his wife that makes its way through the hands of the novel’s six protagonists, The Illumination is a study of expectations and juxtapositions: the journal, an object meant for the two lovers and no one else, remains an artefact of something they’ve lost since the Illumination took hold of the world—the need to express a beauty that is pure and untainted. The journal is ratty, faded, falling apart, yet it retains its original intent—to express love and devotion. The Illumination, on the other hand, is the performance art of an unseen, unspoken higher power—an unexplainable phenomenon gifted to the world as a helping hand, to encourage the expression of one’s inner beauty and repressed pain amongst a society that has forgotten what it means to be open and honest about the terrible, amazing, stunning atrocities we take joy in and feel repulsed by at the same time:




Now the worshippers were on their feet, performing a hymn he knew by heart, their voices flowing just alongside the melody, as if tracing the banks of a stream. And if a bomb were to land on them as they sang so humbly and sincerely, the splendor of their bodies would bathe the town in silver. And if every bomb flew from its arsenal, every body displayed its pain, the globe would catch fire in a Hiroshima of light. And maybe, from somewhere far away, God would notice it and return, and the cinders would receive Him like a hillside washed in the sun.




In some ways, the novel feels a themed mosaic of short narratives. The six lives contained within are drastically different from one another, but as the journal passes through them—either overtly, as an object with life-altering reverence, or subtly, as something that passes through their lives like a metaphor in three-dimensions—Brockmeier uses the Illumination as a counterweight, carving his characters’ pain in swatches, slivers, and harsh-light-of-day strokes. While beautiful in the way they forge connective threads between all people of all races in every corner of the world, the light that shines from within is also disturbing, threatening, and in the end, nowhere near as beautiful as the thousand little ways one man managed to express his love to his wife with nothing but a pen and some paper.

The Illumination is not as spiritual a book as its name might imply. It’s not devoid of such connotations, but its merit is in its artistry—in the way it paints the world as a Terry Riley-esque chance-oriented symphony, the light from within playing against other people, other surfaces, with different chord and key combinations. As one person’s entire being is lit up like the lights at a movie premiere—a power chord to break one’s mind from all distractions—the slow trill of a snake of light arcing through a carefully stitched incision cuts through the cacophony, presenting a light just as bright as any other. Because all pain is not equal, but no amount of pain can be dismissed.

Thanks to Andrew Wilmot.



Right now I'm caught on Asher Book's Try, thanks to seeyoon :D








The Wind Almost Took You

When you have done the things you've done.





We all dream to live; only to find out we're barely alive.



Day 138
I can sacrifice my health.




And maybe something's missing in your mind. Maybe you don't work the same way everyone else does. Maybe you're just different. That would be good news.

((: this is for you amanda.







If you think that girl leaning out the window to smell the rain can tell you what's going on inside her heart, you know even less about it than you think.

This is for you wannon.



It's been so long since I wrote )):



But the reality is that we communicate with every part of our being, and there are times when we must use it all. When someone needs us, he or she needs all of us. There’s no text that can replace a loving touch when someone we love is hurting.



For his new movie!!!

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

— Steve Jobs



For every time a murmur of affection that passes through your lips, a rain is staring somewhere, now.





Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

I guess it goes both ways, because what we seek, what we're working and striving so hard for, are just as much useless ambitions, hopes and dreams that are nothing on a speck that is almost nothing. I have Wannon and Carl Sagan to thank for this post :)



:D there was this dude on the bus who was reading a magazine and I sat behind him, a little higher ground and the page he was reading had this heading:

Taking the LEAP,
having the FAITH to follow her call

(I was thinking: LOL what call? Nature's call??)

It caught my eye mainly because the Leap and Faith were capitalised and bolded, which reminded me of Inception's "to take a leap of faith" ;D



One of the worst feelings in the world is having to doubt something you thought was unquestionable.

Labels: JGL