Parallel Lives Quotes

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or million other things, but she was still in in some way all of those people. They were all her. She could of been all those amazing people, and that wasn't depressing, as she had thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“All beyond this is portentous and fabulous, inhabited by poets and mythologers, and there is nothing true or certain.”
― Plutarch, The Lives of the Great Greeks & Romans

“Most of my colleagues who work with past life clients have listened to overlapping time chronologies from people living on Earth in two places at once. Occasionally, there are three or more parallel lives. Souls in almost any stage of development are capable of living multiple physical lives, but I really don't see much of this in my cases. Many people feel the idea of souls having the capacity to divide in the spirit world and then attaching to two or more human bodies is against all their preconceptions of a singular, individualized spirit. I confess that I too felt uncomfortable the first time a client told me about having parallel lives. I can understand why some people find the concept of soul duality perplexing, especially when faced with the further proposition that one soul may even be capable of living in different dimensions during the same relative time. What we must appreciate is, if our souls are all part of one great over-soul energy force which divides, or extends itself to create our souls, then why shouldn't the offspring of this intelligent soul energy have the same capacity to detach and then recombine?" Chapter Ten The Intermediate Soul”
― Michael Newton, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives

“Well, what would you say if I said that I have visited my other lives, and I think I have chosen this one?'
'I would think you were insane. But I'd still like you.'
'Well, I have. I have had many lives.'
He smiled. 'Great. Is there one where you kiss me again?'
'There is one where you buried my dead cat.'
He laughed. 'That's so cool, Nor. The thing I like about you is that you always make me feel normal'
And that was it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition....Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.”
― Haig, Matt

“It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush, from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.”
― Tomas Tranströmer

“William Redgrave lives two lives at once—a fragile balance between who he is and who he wishes to be.”
― Val Chromos, The Time In Between

“Sometimes the hardest journey is the one between our own selves.”
― Val Chromos, The Time In Between

“What defines us when memory and recognition don’t match?”
― Val Chromos, The Time In Between

“Lack of culture equals to parallel lives, however through art, oneness, sanity and sense of belonging is restored.”
― Unarine Ramaru

“I shouldn't tell you this, but I've been having these weird dreams like every single night for three weeks now where I'm being contacted. Not by ghosts, exactly, but people from other histories, where things turned out differently than they did here. And they're all envious. And they all say: You are so lucky. You live in the best of all possible worlds. And you don't even know it.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Certain thoughts Rebecca keeps to her self, like how can anyone say for sure that the other life was the dream, and not this one? But what instrument can she ascertain these moments right here - with her girl on her lap, looking up so sweetly, those cheeks, her first tooth - are not part of a strange and pleasant dream she is dreaming in old age?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“Don't look back. Live the now in your future and live your future in the NOW.”
― Hiral Nagda

“It's entirely possible that every time we make a decision, there's a version of us out there somewhere who made a different choice. An infinite number of versions of ourselves are living out the consequences of every single possibility of our lives.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Maybe in Another Life

“Sometimes we get more chances than we think we'll get. Sometimes we don't get the ones we want. I believe there are parallel lives swirling all around us where all our dreams came true and stayed. ⁣⠀”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Det är en natt med strålande sol. Jag står i den täta skogen och ser bort mot mitt hus med sina disblåa väggar. Som om jag vore nyligen död och såg huset från en ny vinkel.

Det har stått mer än åtti somrar. Dess trä är impregnerat med fyra gånger glädje och tre gånger sorg. När någon som bott i huset dör målas det om. Den döda personen målar själv, utan pensel, inifrån.

På andra sidan är det öppen terräng. Förr en trädgård, nu förvildad. Stillastående brottsjöar av ogräs, pagoder av ogräs, framvällande text, uppsnärjdare av ogräs, en vikingaflotta av ogräs, drakhuvuden, lansar, ett ogräs-imperium!

Över den förvildade trädgården flaxar skuggan av en bumerang som kastas gång på gång. Det har samband med en som bodde i huset långt före min tid. Nästan ett barn. En impuls utgår från honom, en tanke, en viljetanke: »skapa . . . rita . . .« för att hinna ut ur sitt öde.

Huset liknar en barnteckning. En ställföreträdande barnslighet som växte fram därför att någon alltför tidigt avsade sig uppdraget att vara barn. Öppna dörren, stig in! Här inne är oro i taket och fred i väggarna. Över sängen hänger ett amatörsegel, föreställande ett skepp med sjutton segel, fräsande vågkammar och en vind som den förgyllda ramen inte kan hejda.

Det är alltid så tidigt här inne, det är före vägskälen, före de oåterkalleliga valen. Tack för det här livet! Ändå saknar jag alternativen. Alla skisser vill bli verkliga.

En motor på vattnet långt borta tänjer ut sommarnattens horisont. Både glädje och sorg sväller i daggens förstoringsglas. Vi vet det egentligen inte, men anar det: det finns ett systerliv till vårt liv, som går en helt annan trad. Medan solen brinner bakom öarna.”
― Tomas Tranströmer