«He also failed. He contemplated the ruins of his failures, but always found the strength to look ahead to what was yet to come.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 13
«There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.»
Leo Tolstoy
«Ultimately, throughout the course of their relationship, they both became specialists in each other’s non-verbal language, which they carefully learned to interpret, to the point of consider it to be much more assertive and reliable, in conveying a message, than, actually, words.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12
«You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.»
Tracy Chevalier
«So, every time he felt on the verge of being swept away by anxiety and his thoughts were dangerously becoming an incoherent mush, he would get on his car and drive without a specific destination.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12
«I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.»
Jack Kerouac
«Comfortably seated on the passenger’s seat, and although feeling a bit weary from the long drive, she still managed to maintain her senses on alert mode to absorb all the changes, like a curious and enthusiastic spectator.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 12
«The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.»
Henry Miller
«Like a sudden rush of energy in a lifeless being, that contagious and familiar sound, immediately re-established the connection with the sometimes forgotten and often neglected part of him that still preserved that childlike ability, to believe in what is considered impossible, in the light of the rational standards.
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11
«Don’t walk too far away from the child within you, and never abandon the sense of wonder that magnifies the smallest of things into mountains of joy — for one day, when you lose sight of happiness, that child within can guide you back to the things that once nourished your heart.»
Dodinsky
«He felt that his senses gradually grew sharper making him sensible to all manifestations of life that were simultaneously happening around him, even the tiniest and imperceptible ones.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11
«How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.»
Jostein Gaarder
«The profound silence of the nocturnal hours has always been one of the factors that impressed him the most in those lone night incursions, but in order to fully benefit from that experience, he needed to empty his head from all the gibberish talk that had been overpowering his thoughts and allow this peaceful state, resulting from the absence of noise, to impregnate his mind, like a sponge gladly welcomes the liquid element which will transform its barren matter into a fertile receptacle of life.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11
«A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.»
Christopher Isherwood
«Every time he gazed at the night sky, with its countless celestial bodies, illuminating the profuse and deep darkness, and submitted it, to the limited scrutiny capacity of the human eye, he automatically condemned his terrestrial nature to navigate his thoughts between two compelling possibilities: whether to feel crushed under the acknowledgment of the unimaginable dimension of the universe’s infinity, or to surrender to the irresistible attraction of being sucked in to the vastness of its mysteries. It was roaming between those two possibilities that he always found a starting point from which to derive his thoughts.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11
«The product of that imperceptible speech can be found everywhere, whether in the form a slightest chill in the spine or in a stubborn certainty that despite the faint odds, never fades away.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 11
«And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.»W.B.Yeats
«It was time to leave. She closed her eyes and let herself be rocked by the sounds of the gentle lapping ocean waves. Her breathing and heartbeat became one with that sound and magically everything seemed to make sense again.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty, the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.»
Sir David Attenborough
«Time passed by quickly. The tide was slowly rising again and the sun was setting. The sounds and smells were now more intense than ever. Behind her, the ocean mist descended upon that place transforming the coastal vegetation into a distant blur. Soon the darkness would take over the beach.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«At the beach, life is different. Time doesn’t move hour to hour but mood to moment. We live by the currents, plan by the tides, and follow the sun.»Unknown
«Despite her hands and feet were frozen cold, she felt more alive than ever, for she welcomed and honored all these ocean’s offerings with her ability to awe, when at their presence, and to cherish them like small treasures.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me.That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly,and my blood is part of the sea.There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.»
D. H. Lawrence
«Oddly, it was the ephemeral aspect of that reality that made that moment even more significant and the only way to eternalize it was to fully embrace it and live it. She knew that the present moment is the sole guardian and holder of life’s essence and those blind to that fact or reluctant to accept it, would never fully experience it.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«True wealth is the ability to fully experience life.»Henry David Thoreau
«At a distance, a flock of seagulls errantly circled in the air and its occasional squawking calls indicated that she was not the only one out there.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«That you are here - that life exists and identify, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.»Walt Whitman
«She had an instant of hesitation before opening the car’s door, so that she could linger, for a few more seconds, in the final frontier, where wishes are just about to be fulfilled and therefore prolong the bliss of positive expectations.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive and to relish that knowledge – this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.»Edna Ferber
«Suddenly, there it was. First, just a glimpse of it. Then, as a prelude before the final revelation of the magnificent element, the daylight slightly changed its intensity by becoming brighter, and after a set of sand dunes, the open ocean was finally right in front of her.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«You know a moment is important when it is making your mind so numb with beauty.»Friedrich Nietzsche
«Although only a few miles separated her from her destination, the anxiety she was feeling inside did not tone down. In fact, it seemed that it grew stronger in the inverse proportion of the distance still keeping her apart from her goal.»By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«This is the place of places and it is here.»
«Like she expected, just right in front of her, the horizon gradually enlarged and the landscape flattened, as she left behind the tall concrete buildings and other effective indicators of the illusory human domain over nature and entered the sacred realm of one of the most magical territories.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 10
«A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.»Goethe
«That night, they chose to stop the motion that had been pushing them further away from each other and commit themselves to slowly restore the bond they still shared but did not seem to remember anymore.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 9
«It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.»
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
«At that precise moment, although without any kind of formal and rational recognition from the parts involved, a silent pact was made.»
By Raquel R. in Short Story number 9
«Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.»Arthur Schopenhauer
