{"quotes":[{"text":"I couldn’t believe it; my deepest darkest fantasy of a cute school girl slowly stripping in front of me was finally unbelievingly coming true! Furthermore, it wasn’t just any school girl, but one from my school, that was the icing on the cake, or at least it should have been. Because, at the same time that my fantasy was becoming reality, I felt that I was being very badly cheated. Why couldn’t it have been sixteen year old Heather Johnson or fifteen year old Pamela wade stripping before me, instead of the eight year old Ami Fujishiro?","author":"Andrew James Pritchard","tags":["cheated","deepest-darkest-fantasy","disapointed","disbelief","fantasy","icing-on-the-cake","school-girl","stripping"],"id":1292,"author_id":"Andrew+James+Pritchard"},{"text":"Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. \tYou are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. \t“He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":16223,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t helping wondering would happen if I told myself I could?","author":"Craig D. Lounsbrough","tags":["belief","believe","bold","brazen","challenges","challenging","commitment","confidence","confident","daring","disbelief","engage","engaging","fear","goals","intimidated","life","sabotage","scared","self-sabotage","tenacity"],"id":22876,"author_id":"Craig+D.+Lounsbrough"},{"text":"When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?”“I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.”“Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.","author":"Michael Marshall Smith","tags":["courage","disbelief","faith","unbelief"],"id":25017,"author_id":"Michael+Marshall+Smith"},{"text":"Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":32108,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal.","author":"Thomm Quackenbush","tags":["disbelief","doubt"],"id":36592,"author_id":"Thomm+Quackenbush"},{"text":"Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what?\t I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.","author":"Annie Dillard","tags":["amen","beauty","belief","consciousness","creation","curiosity","disbelief","energy","enoughness","epiphany","exploration","exultant","faith","fate","fearless","fire","free","freedom","gaps","god","grace","growth","hallelujah","humility","illumination","intricacy","joy","joyful","joyfulness","life-force","light","living-in-the-present-moment","longing","mindfulness","multiplicity","mystery","nature","philosopher-s-stone","philosophy","poem","poet","poetry","power","praise","prayer","prayers","praying","religion","religious-diversity","ring-the-bells","science","seeing","seeking","soul","spirit","stalking-the-gaps","the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it","tolerance","walking","watching","wonder"],"id":51793,"author_id":"Annie+Dillard"},{"text":"Ironically, the only people anyone believes these days are the skeptics.","author":"J.S.B. Morse","tags":["atheism","belief","believe","disbelief","faith","religion","science"],"id":55954,"author_id":"J.S.B.+Morse"},{"text":"Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the 'uncanny' to outline the results of violence: Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.","author":"Nicole Waller","tags":["denial","derealization","disbelief","ptsd","self-doubt","trauma-memories","traumatic-experiences","traumatized","unreal"],"id":63320,"author_id":"Nicole+Waller"},{"text":"(Marlowe's) Faustus stubbornly reverts to his atheistic beliefs and continues his elementary pagan re-education ~ the inferno to him is a 'place' invented by men.","author":"E.A. Bucchianeri","tags":["atheism","christopher-marlowe","disbelief","faust","faust-legend","faustian","faustus","hell","inferno","marlowe","paganism"],"id":63809,"author_id":"E.A.+Bucchianeri"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":77,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}