Marija

“Well, how can that be real?’ ‘Prove that it is not,’ said Xenophilius. Hermione looked outraged. ‘But that’s – I’m sorry, but that’s completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of – of all the pebbles in the world, and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!’ ‘Yes, you could,’ said Xenophilius. ‘I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer.
As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint.
I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively.
I frame the cheerful response.
What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the nature of a whine.
Do not whine, I write on an index card. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“To be awed. To experience a communal sense of awe. I can feel it on stage and see it in people’s eyes. And I experience it too. It’s certainly something I have felt many, many times at other artists’ concerts. It’s about reaching an essential and shared state through music – sometimes for a moment, sometimes for an entire concert. We’ve all experienced that. Not just a physical release, although there is that, too, but to be held by an artist at the crucial moment of expression – to be awed, second by second, at the way a song or piece of music unfolds, to be held on the edge of tears by the drama of it all, and to be, as an audience member, an essential participant in the drama itself. That is a wonderful thing. […] So thank God, quite literally, for music, because it’s one of the last remaining places, beyond raw nature, that people can feel awed by something happening in real time, that feeling of reverence and wonder. […] These are sacred moments.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage