Seeing Through To The Other Side Quotes & Sayings

Near my feet is a glowing archway. The light is white and shimmery, like iridescent glitter, and it's so tall the top nearly brushes the ceiling. Inside, instead of seeing the cement wall of the basement, I'm looking at evenly spaced wooden pillars and a reed-mat floor. Standing on that mat is a woman with curves that would make a Playboy model jealous. She's wearing a long, butter yellow dress, and her white hair hangs down to her waist. She looks like an angel when she smiles at me, holding out her hands.
"Hudson, come with me." Her voice reminds me of the breeze rustling through the trees near the lake. Soft and subtle and calming. "Let me help you."
Did I die? Maybe the scratch on my side got infected. Maybe I've been slowly bleeding to death from internal injuries for the past week. Who knows? If this is death, if she's what's waiting for me on the other side, then fuck it. I'm letting go. — Erica Cameron

He'd never played in Wrigley Field - the Cubs had still been out at old West Side Grounds when he came through as a catcher for the Cardinals before the First World War. But seeing the ballpark in ruins brought the reality of this war home to him like a kick in the teeth. Sometimes big things would do that, sometimes little ones; he remembered a doughboy breaking down and sobbing like a baby when he found some French kid's dolly with its head blown off. Muldoon's eyes slid over toward Wrigley for a moment. "Gonna be a long time before the Cubs win another pennant," he said, as good an epitaph as any for the park - and the city. — Harry Turtledove

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous. — A.S. Byatt

No. No. Not this. Not this, that had kept him aloof from his fellows through school. Not this, fear of seeing the sun on a cheekbone, filtered through someone's eyelashes, or the shadow of a jawline, and feeling ... this thing. The thing that poets spoke about, but not like this. Not for the girls at the dances with their shy smiles and sturdy prettiness but for the boys, milling about on the other side of the room in navy shirts and red ties, looking, by turns, bored and nervous and happy. — Anonymous

In our manner of speech, our plans of living, our dealings with others, our conduct and walk in the church and out of it-all should be done as becomes the gospel (Phil. 1:27). — Albert C. Barnes

I think the Lower East Side inspires me. That whole neighborhood, a lot of the people that I worked with, seeing what we've gone through in life, being given an opportunity to understand who I am; my identity, my culture, and my roots. — Luis Guzman

What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer-a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory-into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values ... more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved. — David Foster Wallace

My experience showed me an ugly side of our human nature. That if we are told it's alright to step on someone, we will do so, in joy that we are not the one being stepped on. If we are told we can treat someone as lesser, we will do it, since it means we are more than they are." -Norrie, Seeing Through Sampson's Eyes — Pamela Schloesser Canepa

Reformation, like education, is a journey, not a destination. — Mary Harris Jones

If you walked by a street and you was walking a concrete and you saw a rose growing from concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete. So way is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how am leaning crooked to the side, u can't even see that I've come up from out of that. — Tupac Shakur

When extraordinary power and extraordinary pay are allotted to any individual in a government, he becomes the center, round which every kind of corruption generates and forms. — Thomas Paine

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town. — Terry Pratchett

I never bothered with cars. I was probably one of the few kids in school who didn't run around with hot-rod magazines. As I would be at home fiddling with my guitar, they would be fiddling with a car engine. — Angus Young

A lie can run deeper than strength or wisdom. — Mark Lawrence

Our Company was participating in a management seminar in which we were taught a strategy that goes by the unlovely name of 'reverse your buts.' I did not make this up! It works like this:
Maybe you're thinking, 'I love you, but you're driving me crazy.' Instead, try thinking, 'You're driving me crazy, but I love you. Isn't it amazing how different that feels? — Emily Watts

In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood - red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin - which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side.

It's a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing 'The End.' Even if you didn't like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it's over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling. — Jo Ann Beard

Quentin found himself staring at the end of his Brakebills careers across the perilously slender gap of only two months of time. It was like he'd been wending his way though a vast, glittering city, zig-zagging through side streets and wandering through buildings and haunted de Chrico arcades and little hidden piazzas, the whole time thinking that he'd barely scratched the surface, that he was just seeing a tiny sliver of one little neighborhood. And then suddenly he turned a corner and it turned out that he'd been through the whole city, it was all behind him, and all that was left was one short street leading straight out of town. — Lev Grossman

Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing. — Michel Houellebecq

The craziest, most selfish act is to commit suicide. When you kill yourself, you kill others. — Jenny Joseph

I eventually became proud of my strikeouts, because each one represented another learning experience. — Willie Stargell

TO MR. CYRIACK SKINNER UPON HIS BLINDNESS
Cyriack, this three years day these eys, though clear
To outward view, of blemish or of spot;
Bereft of light thir seeing have forgot,
Nor to thir idle orbs doth sight appear
Of Sun or Moon or Starre throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not
Against heavns hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear vp and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, Friend, to have lost them overply'd
In libertyes defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content though blind, had I no better guide. — John Milton

I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they're a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there's this thick, high wall. At least, that's how I saw it at first ... I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine. Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mache. The second I leaned on it, I'd probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe it's that the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven't noticed. — Haruki Murakami