Shandare > Recent Status Updates

Finally!
I want to read it all in one go, yet slowly savour it so it’ll last.
Why is this always the problem with good books??

And you both hurt each other terribly, because you’re family. Because what you say and do matters so much more than anyone else.

At the end of the day, people have to be who they are. If you try to take that from them, you diminish them. You reduce them to children, unable to make decisions for themselves. There’s no way to poison your relationship with someone else faster.

Auuggghhhh!!!!
Is finally here!
I’m going to savour this as slow as I can!

I stood there and listened and let the feelings come to me. You don’t have to be a witch to appreciate that homes and houses and even stores hold history and emotions.

And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
—W. H. Auden

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless
wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
—Socrates (469–399 BCE)

“Why can’t assholes let me be a pacifist the way I really want to be?”

“There isn’t anything wrong with the darkness, you know,” she said, almost kindly. “It’s just as beautiful as anything else.”

There was nothing more infuriating than someone who was being pedantic about something you know they don’t give a damn about.

The measure of an intelligent man, she thought, is when he allows reason to influence his actions, whether he wants it to or not.

...natural evil is our capacity for meanness, when we make the choice to do things that cause great harm.

She lived the same story so many other soldiers did. She was haunted by the ghosts of those she had served with who had fallen, by the ghosts of the innocents harmed by war, by the ghosts of decisions she had made and not made, and now would have to live with for the rest of her life.

Damage meant nothing except that the person had lived life and taken a few knocks along the way.

...societies tend to either arrest and hang war criminals or build statues for them, and there’s hardly any in-between. It kind of depends on who won the war.

“Bad guys outside, good guys inside,” I said. Americans, I’ve found, have a notoriously Manichaean worldview; sometimes it’s easiest to speak in those terms when dealing with them.

Wars are started for reasons that seem stupid in hindsight but make sense at the time.

I don’t know of any other species that is quite as good at finding stupid ways to die as humans.

We as a species are now vacationing in places that used to kill us.

“I’m a fuckin’ honey badger and by this claw”—she held her hand up—“I fuckin’ rule.”

“I’d hate me, too . . . because I’m always right. I understand how painful that must be for others who aren’t always right.”

But as always in the world of shifters . . . the bears came in and fucked all that shit up.

“My complete lack of athletic abilities is finally coming in handy during middle age. I have zero sports-related injuries.”

Fear no more the lightning flash, nor the all-dreaded thunder stone, fear not slander, censure rash, thou hast finished joy and moan: All lovers young, all lovers must, consign to thee, and come to dust.

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty, well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a ride!’”

That’s why I don’t waste my time on ninety-nine out of a hundred people I meet. They are moonshine, like those glimmers of moonlight you get on the sea at night. They might be pretty, real alluring sometimes, but they wink and they are gone because they were never real.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”