Angel > Recent Status Updates

…life’s going to keep pushing you around, but you have to keep playing.”

People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.

How do you do that?

Do what?

You’re always so…positive about things.

Oh, that. It’s a double-edged sword. It’s also why I’m always late. Optimistic people are overly optimistic about their ability to get somewhere on time. And they’re usually wrong.

*****

Me: 🙌 PREACH 🙌

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and mile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel.

Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crossed into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day with love, with longing, and for so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.

Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibility...every human will has the power to transform its fate....no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.

There is no man, and no place, without war...The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get--who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.

The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.

The wrong thing, for the right reasons...the war, the struggle for power, was always the same, everywhere, and it was always wrong.

There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you're determined to dislike for no good reason.

Sometimes we see the past clearly & read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose & a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life no matter how well or poorly lived is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. In the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significant: its beginning and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

He'd been able to deal with that pain because he'd accepted his own part in causing it.

Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.

...assassin grief...the kind of grief that lies in wait & attacks from ambush, with no warning and no mercy & can hide for years and strike suddenly on the happiest day w/out discernible reason or exegesis...you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honor is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in a n honorable way--the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason- and you can enforce the peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honor is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

...love's a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn't something you get; it's something you give.

You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, loving and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever, Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good.

I was babbling, raving, in shock. I know the symptoms now...A rare few know exactly what to do: their weapons are returning fire before their bodies have finished an instinctive crouch and roll. Others laugh, and can't stop laughing. Others cry and call for their mama or their wife or their God. Some get so quiet, shrinking down inside themselves, that even their friends are spooked by it. And some just talk...

Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong- that we don't lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.

Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name...

Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often and for so long that when it speaks we hear not one but 100 sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

...fate gives all of us 3 teachers, 3 friends, 3 enemies, and 3 great loves in our lives. But theses 12 are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them.

Personality and personal identity are in some ways like coordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationship. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.

Fanaticism is the opposite of love. A wise man once told me--he's a Muslim-that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable minded Jew or Christina or Buddhist or Hindu or even atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. Winston Churchill once defined fanatic as someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject.

I envied his peace and his courage and his perfect understanding of himself...if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we're half way to wisdom.

Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even though, has an effect on you that's greater than zero.... some things, like the sound of a bird has such a small effect that you can't detect...some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you've just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and they change your life forever.

...two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill...If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever...fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.

There's probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals...all politicians are ruthless and corrupt & all political systems favor the powerful rich over the defenseless poor... the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.