One liners....

Progress was Mother Earth’s ultimate malignancy.

......Dan Brown

I do remember......

One that has stayed close to my heart.

Remember it always. Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.


......Jhumpa Lahiri

Are you there, God ?

Read this one in Reader's Digest decades ago. Had sent it with a letter. Years later I read it again when I found it in a bundle of letters. Life, like sea brings back stuff....on another shore may be. Found it again while searching for something else in Google today.

There is no God. All of the wonders around us are accidental. No almighty hand made a thousand-billion stars. They made themselves. No power keeps them on their steady course. The earth spins itself to keep the oceans from falling off toward the sun. Infants teach themselves to cry when they are hungry or hurt. A small flower invented itself so that we could extract digitalis for sick hearts.

The earth gave itself day and night, tilted itself so that we get seasons. Without the magnetic poles, man would be unable to navigate the trackless oceans of water and air, but they just grew there.

How about the sugar thermostat in the pancreas? It maintains a level of sugar in the blood sufficient for energy. Without it, all of us would fall into a coma and die.

Why does snow sit on mountain tops waiting for the warm spring sun to melt it at just the right time for the young crops in farms below to drink? A very lovely accident?

The human heart will beat for 70 or 80 years without faltering. How does it get sufficient rest between beats? A kidney will filter poison from the blood, and leave good things alone. How does it know one from another?

Who gave the human tongue flexibility to form words and a brain to understand them, but denied it to all other animals?

Who showed a womb how to take the love of two persons and keep splitting a tiny ovum until, in time, a baby would have the proper number of fingers, eyes, ears and hair in the right places, and come into the world when it is strong enough to sustain life?

There is no God -- or is there?

.....Jim Bishop

A book after weeks !

Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable or irreplacable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more.

..........Alice McDermott