Nick Irving > Recent Status Updates

Christ, it’s all getting to you, I thought. Making you paranoid.
. . .
It’s funny the things you remember - and forget.

Our tack was toward the eastern distance, and no glimpse of land or cloud made us aught but solitary travelers in illimitable space. The sun was beneath the deep, but in the hush of the pale light one felt the awe of its coming.

Sleep was a long time coming.

The way things were looking, it was going to be a long game.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it allows one to endure unhappiness in relative comfort.

“I would like to see the world I read of.”

They come to the islands to stay until they die, and death means a crown the brighter for martyrdom.

Fists are raised. Shouts are being hurled. The air reeks of unresolved violence.

“Aue te hanahana, aqua ho’i te kaikai.” - “He who will not labor, neither shall he eat.”

Yet generals send ten thousand men to certain and agonized death to gain a point toward a goal; that is the custom of generals, by which they gain honor among their people.

Yet why cavil at the vehicle by which one arrives at Nirvana?

His ghoulish laughter rose in the dark stillness of the jungle, and the hair stirred on my scalp.

Through my own horror, my own disorientation and disgust, I am ashamed to say that I feel some flicker of satisfaction at the helplessness of their expressions.
. . .
Evil men seeing their power ripped away. There is, I quickly learn, no sadder or more gratifying sight.

“Just because what you told them is true does not erase your past. Words sound the same coming from the honest and the deceiving, the informed and the deceived. They matter - never think otherwise - but most of the time, people need to be shown a truth before they will truly believe it.”

Freedom is the one purpose, wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings, in this earth.

"Our craft is too poor. A society built on money does not give artists and singers the freedom they had in the old days, my friend. We are bound to a wheel that turns relentlessly."

He would live as his fathers had lived, and die as they had died. A

"People are always the weakest part of any system."

"When power is so entrenched, so impossibly distant, blood becomes the only possible currency of change."
. . .
The city's celebrations rattle around us, a harsh and echoing drum of discontent.

Upon this people, sparkingly alive, spirited as wild horses, not depressed as were their conquerors by a heritage of thousands of years of metes and bounds, religion as forced upon them has been not only a narcotic, but a death potion.

"You saved me. Saved me from a nightmare, and I can never repay that debt. But you took something from me, too. You took my belief. You took my comfort. And now instead of enjoying life, I fear death."

My heart leaps up then I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

Just because you are not right for a place does not mean you were never meant to be there.

Our way led up heights of marvelous beauty, along the edges of deep defiles that opened below our feet like valleys of Paradise.... thousands of orchids hung like butterflies.

When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

Let the world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

The kindly green of the jungle had hidden the marks of human habitations, where once they had lived and loved and died.

Still hard to wrap my head around the concept. The end of the world. Even now, the thought fills me with a disconnected sense of unease more than the genuine panic I know it should. As if something so vast and terrifying can't be real, is so impossible to imagine that it cannot be properly feared.

The darkness was incredible, burdensome, like a weight.

Chain your anger in the dark, and it will only grow. But sometimes chains are the only way.