Dead ends Quotes

“How to read this book:Even after I was told my father was dead, I believed (I still believe) that I could fix everything- that if I logged enough miles in my VW and kept telling stories through the countless dead ends and breakdowns, I could undo the terrible tree events…not that I should have expected to with this particular power, which is incomplete (as I was forced to sell a few stories and procedures for time-of-money), full of holes. Sure, the book turns on, lights up; its fans whirr and the bookengine crunches. But some of the pages are completely blank; others hang by a thread. the book’s transmission is shot, too, so don’t’ be surprised if the book slips from one version to the next as you’re reading .Finally, the thermostat’s misked, so you should expect sudden changes in temperature, the pages might get cold, or it may begin to snow between paragraphs, or you may turn the page and get hit with a faceful of rain or blinding beams of sunlight.So go ahead. Do it-open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see you. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading, and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you are absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords- your fratures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people…your stories are written right there on your face!”

“Dead ends are where the real thinking begins.”

“It was so strange, the way that life moved forward: the twists and the dead ends, the sudden opportunities. She supposed if you could predict or foresee everything that was going to happen, you’d lose the motivation to go through it all. The promise was always in the possibility.”

“[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself.”

“Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.”

“As the rain falls and the sun shines, they grow, grow, grow; minds so open, they go through life aware and accepting, seeing light where there's dark, seeing possibility in dead ends, tasting victory as others spit out failure, questioning where others accept. Just a little less jaded, a little less cynical.”

“We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve's last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values-the whole Pandora's box of immaturity-were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in the later years.”

“In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.”

“To overlook those years (muddled, complicated times) is to fall into the trap of only celebrating success. We can learn as much, if not more, from failure, from promising paths that turn into dead ends. The vision, understanding, patience, and wisdom that informed Steve's last decade were forged in the trials of these intervening years. The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values-the whole Pandora's box of immaturity- were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in later years.”