sombre lines i saved in my notes app
to use in sombre novels i never wrote
This was a busy week, and I couldn’t complete what I wanted to share this sunday. So instead, I went through my old notes app (the one I used to write in during college) and collated some sad quotes for you that I had put down hoping to give them to some characters I was developing for a novel I soon outgrew (alongside my melancholy).
The best way to enjoy reading them might be to imagine one of your favorite actors (maybe Walter Goggins because he can carry the blues) delivering them while standing at the shore of a misty, cold beach on a grey afternoon, staring into the distance, while sneaking glances at you.
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“The fate of the universe was sealed the day it popped out of the big bang: things only ever grow further apart.”
“Some nights I look down upon myself and I see that I'm a river held by a sturdy old dam. And I have it in me to shatter the dam and flow freely, and inspire all the other rivers and all the small streams and all the unborn rivers in their frozen glaciers to do the same. But I don't do any of that. I let the dam contain me, make me look like a lake while I'm something else. I let it do that because I fear when I destroy the dam, I'll end up destroying all the fish that swim in me and all the forests that surround me. I fear those who have the might to build that dam might come back with something sturdier. So I just wait for them to do it themselves, and I just wait, pretending like a lake and thinking like a river.”
“Who is watching art? Who is hurt enough to enjoy pain? Who is consuming art? Who is happy enough to seek pain?”
“The world recycles. Through creation and destruction, the only forces of nature keep swinging between extremes. Preservation is a futile act of escapism. Which is why any attempt to preserve life, to preserve relations, to preserve ourselves, it falls. To become the world, it is in my nature to swing between extremes, between extremes of love and isolation, acceptance and rejection, awareness and submergence. It is through these acts of recycling that I can continue to preserve the essence of my very nature, of my truth of belonging to the whole world.”
“For those fleeting days when you're chasing love, and for those unfaltering days when it's running from you, for all those days like no other time, every song and every prose speaks to you and only you.”
“Cliches are beautiful. They're the ghosts of a lost generation. ‘Tu kaunsa koi jang ladke aa raha hai’ was probably once the sharpest of sarcasms.” (Walter Goggins can’t do this one btw)
“You were born to earth. You can't choose between your autumns and your springs.”
“Once while treking the mountains, I came across a lake I’d never heard of. It was immense in all ways a lake could be called immense. But it wasn't there on the maps. It only took me a little while to figure out that this might be the only place on earth which hasn't yet been named, the only place on earth where you could truly be lost. I know some day someone else will come across it too. And they might choose to name it. They'd reduce a serenity to words and photographs, and then the only chance for humanity to lose themselves would be lost.”
“When rats press a red button that gives them electric shock, their epigenetics passes that experience down to their kids who’ve never even been around red buttons. That's the length nature would go to, to avoid pain. But not us, no... We want pain, we romanticize it and when it's gone, we miss it. To feel something, we are willing to feel anything.”
“When I was a child and I dreamt of a house atop a hill, with those slanted roofs that never let rain or snow form a pool above my head, and I dreamt of climbing mountains to play games at the highest heights, and I dreamt of monsters and fairies who lived in the caves of those pine forests and traded punishments and rewards... And then I was an adult and my dreams never went beyond my sleeps... So now all I know is that life's just a duality of irony: the first part is childhood and the second is just trying to recreate it.”
“If it wasn't for moonless nights, I never could have known that beauty exists even in colourless corners.”
“Nature and man, that's all the world is now. A singularity broken into two factions, a forced dichotomy. The ravens in the tree will never claim independence from the forest. It's only the human that watches awestruck as the leaves of spring turn yellow, come October. ‘Wow, nature!’ he exclaims, who comes from it.”
“You haven't even scratched the surface of your heart's depths. You have no clue how much more it is capable of feeling, and I don't know whether to pity you for that or to envy you.”
“Why do matters that come with ease to the heart, come with difficulty to the tongue?”
“Night was a time to get lost and day a time to be found. And so he ran across the world faster than the moon, so the sun would never rise for him. That's how I found him, just when I was getting tired of running myself.”
That’s all for this week. If you liked this collection and would like me to share more of these, do let me know in the comments. And please definitely tell me your favorite ones!
I also noticed that my writings during these times (2014-19) were so full of idyllic allegories to nature, and I’m wondering whether the bucolic conditions of my hostel days in Pilani have something to do with it. Mumbai doesn’t offer that kind of bounty, and over the coming months I might just sit down to explore how my surroundings have shaped my writings.
Reading this sometimes felt like looking in the mirror and sometimes like looking at ghosts of past selves.
Beautifully written! The dam metaphor hit hard for me.
There's something deeply powerful about being both lake and river at once...sometimes yes, feeling trapped, yet realizing you’ve supported so much life along the way makes it not as regrettable?
Maybe, in the end, we're all just water trying to flow...