“It doesn’t happen all at once, said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – Margery Williams Bianca, The Velveteen Rabbit
by Spanky_McFly_1015
3 Comments
liars destroy the currency of all words – Elizabeth Jane Howard.
>’It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.’
‘Yet seldom do they fail of their seeds,’ said Legolas. ‘And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.’
‘And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,’ said the Dwarf.
‘To that the Elves know not the answer,’ said Legolas.”
It has always felt like the ultimate blow for someone leaning towards what we’d call today impostor syndrome.
“There was, they say, a certain thinker and philosopher here on your earth, who ‘rejected all- laws, conscience, faith,* and, above all, the future life. He died and thought he’d go straight into darkness and death, but no–there was the future life before him. He was amazed and indignant: ‘This,’ he said, ‘goes against my convictions’ So for that he was sentenced . . . I mean, you see, I beg your pardon, I’m repeating what I heard, it’s just a legend . .. you see, he was sentenced to walk in darkness a quadrillion kilometers (we also use kilometers now), and once he finished that quadrillion, the doors of paradise would be opened to him and he would be forgiven everything.”
Well, so this man sentenced to the quadrillion stood a while looked and then lay down across the road ‘I don’t want to go, I refuse to go on principle!’ Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked in the belly of a whale for three days and three nights–you’ll get the character of this thinker lying in the road.”
“And what was he lying on?”
“Well, there must have been something there. Or are you laughing?”
“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange animation. He was listening now with unexpected curiosity. “Well, so is he still lying there?”
“The point is that he isn’t. He lay there for nearly a thousand years, and then got up and started walking.”
-from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky