Sierra Kipling > Sierra's Quotes

“A ray of sunlight poked through the mass of angry clouds.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Steel Blood

“In the conditions of this “New World Order,” a crucial part of the contemporary world economy is a criminal economy, in which the excess profits are accumulated not by the production of material comforts, but by drug-traffic, arms trafficking, and human trafficking, including prostitution. The contemporary world economy is an economy of the global organized criminality whose eminently form is the modern capitalist state. The contemporary world economy is an economy not of the real commodity production, but an economy of the jobbery; this is expressed directly in supply and demand of the capital of the speculation, i.e., in the fictitious capital trade, in the antagonistic games with share capital in the stock exchange. Just Wall Street’s stock exchange, i.e., the world speculative capital market, is the contemporary tremendous pump for inflation of the balloons of the world economic crises, the last one of which began in 2007. The aggregate amount of the bonds on the world market, as many economists know, is over one hundred trillion US dollars! Without taking in mind the derivatives! If including those, the aggregate amount is several times more! This is an enormous balloon as inflated as a red giant star! And when added to this amount the world market of the shares, the passing each other between real and fictitious capital grows to cosmic dimensions! This cosmic balloon will burst very soon! That means the most destructive capitalist crisis in human history lies just round the corner, the global economic apocalypse is just forthcoming! This ruin will be due to the stock exchange antagonistic games, the stock exchange that is, as a matter of fact, a gambling house! Because the securities and shares’ trading is sheer gambling! This becomes clear by the direct proportionality between risk and profitability, the more risk—the more profitability, and vice versa! However, this is gambling in which the stakes are not simply money, but millions and billions of human fates. So, this is a destroying-the-civilization-world crime economy!”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“Counselor Bingham and I looked inside, then looked at each other. He counted. Then I counted. There were thirteen mobile phones in the box, two of them were Android. The rest were all iPhones.”
― Behcet Kaya, Uncanny Alliance

“Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world like it was the last bus which had just left the stop without them.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Upon him I will visit famine and a fire,
Till all around him desolation rings
And all the demons in the outer dark
Look on amazed and recognize
That vengeance is the business of a man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“When witnesses concoct lies, they often miss the obvious.”
― John Grisham, The Testament

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“She cannot return your love. She does not live in our world. She does not even live in the world of animals. She lives on a different star, absolutely alone.”
― Mario Puzo, The Last Don

“And now, I pray you, tell me who you are: do not be harder than I've been with you that in the world your name may still endure.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno