Matt Morgan > Recent Status Updates

“The trick to happiness wasn't in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one's life would produce many future moments to anticipate”

"The sorrow," Shallan said softly, "of watching a life crumble? Of struggling to grab it and hold on, but feeling hope become stringy sinew and blood beneath your fingers as everything collapses?"
"Yes."
“The sensation—it's not sorrow, but something deeper—of being broken.“

“Beauty was out there, all around. To create art was not to capture it, but to participate in it.”

"What think you? Can beauty be taken from a man? If he could not touch, taste, smell, hear, see ... what if all he knew was pain? Has that man had beauty taken from him?'
“Does the pain change day by day?"
"Let us say it does," the messenger said.
"Then beauty, to that person, would be the times when the pain lessens.

“All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that's why you so often want to kill each other."

"Too many of us," she said, "take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes. Wouldn't you say?"

“Sometimes we find it hardest to accept in others that which we cling to in ourselves.”

“But expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.”

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

“Power is always more secure when co-optive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet.

“Their objective is not to produce an alert, critical, and informed citizenry but the kind of people who will accept an opinion universe dominated by corporate and governmental elites, almost all of whom share the same ideological perspective about political and economic reality.”

“Each book’s as precious as a person, she says, as it preserves someone’s thoughts and feelings long after they’re gone.”

"Trust is important."
"I think it's more important than love. I mean, I love all kinds of things I don't trust. Thunderstorms... white liquor... snakes.
Sometimes I think I love them because I can't trust them, and how mixed up is that?"

“Rather than pulling back, he held her even tighter as the taste and touch of her made his head spin. So this was what people were talking about! This was what made them so crazy! When they finally broke apart, he drew a deep breath, as if surfacing from the depths.”

“I do my best, thinking of them one by one, releasing them like birds from the protective cages inside me, locking the doors against their return”

“The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.”

“All that arises passes away. This I know.”

“If you then become excessively focused on the goal, perhaps because you are seeking happiness, fulfillment, or a more complete sense of self in it, the Now is no longer honored. It becomes reduced to a mere stepping stone to the future, with no intrinsic value. Clock time then turns into psychological time. Your life's journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to “make it”

“Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.“

“A man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed.”

“Love doesn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants don’t grow very well in a place where it is always dark.”

“they would always be the strangeest, most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, the eyes that come back to you, calm and deep, when you're hurt or in bad trouble or maybe just about out of your mind with grief.”

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side.
Or you don't.

“John had said everything was going to be alright. Funny how I believed those simple words from a friend more than news and rumors of war spoken by authority figures.”