Quotes & Sayings About Split Paths

Everything would turn out exactly the same, and I would return here for a second time, and then, if I was fool enough, a third time, waiting, as now, for my other to touch the canvas. And it would be progressively worse, because though I would know slightly more each time, I would still be powerless to change my fate. Perhaps I would be unaware of the previous decision, yet choose again to come back. Or worse, I would become aware that I was inadvertently repeating the same mistake for a horrific split second just after I made the decision. Infinity was terrifying. Its abyss makes my skin crawl. — Wesley Stace

Whenever you leave cleared land, when you step from some place carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth, that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what's beneath. A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it. In the dead wood of another tree grow fungi black as devil's hooves. Overhead the canopy, tall pines that whistle and shudder and choke off light from their own lower branches. (from "Revival Road") — Louise Erdrich

Our consciousness and awareness, which includes our choices as to where we place our focus, alters the paths of our lives, and creates a split in reality, leading to the creation of two or more worlds at any moment in time. — Kevin Michel

I turn my head a little. The radio's caroling "Tonight," velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria's song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her?
Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Thin fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.
Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn't be answered, the door rings that wouldn't be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.
Now there aren't two paths anymore; there's only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich