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Ashim Shanker Quotes

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Famous Ashim Shanker Quotes

“There will be times in which things appear hopeless. You will begin to doubt everything around you. You will even begin to doubt yourself. You will think things will never look up and you may be in the deepest, darkest, loneliest place in the world. Everything which had once been infused with wonder may appear disappointing and harsh. You may grow cynical and come to believe that this is simply the way the world is...that one must bear with the unforgiving realities of the world and only hope that it doesn’t get worse. You might grow suspicious of others, as adults tend to do, and close yourself off from the rest of the world. You might just look to the past and reminisce about better days...or you might just dwell in one place for a little too long and become nostalgic for the future. Just remember—regardless of where you are, what experiences you have, and who you have become—that there will always be those who have loved you. Those whom you may have taken for granted, but have nonetheless, always had you in their hearts and in their hopes and wishes. Lives that you have touched: whether you realize it or not. To separation you may venture, but indissolubly in union shall you drift...you will always be at the whims of forces, both great and small, and far beyond your capacity to control. That’s how all our stories go. Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.”

FateOceanSelf DoubtAshim ShankerInfinitudeSeparation And UnionHopeless WandererAt The Whims Of ForcesIndefinite SeaIndissolublyInnumerable ArcsNostagia
Book:Don't Forget to Breathe
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“Why indeed does the hand experience such difficulty in rendering itself? ...It is a tragedy, or perhaps a boon, that the form should never know itself or approach anything resembling itself without warping the parameters of its being. Awareness is thusly obliteration and through reproduction of this intuitive knowing, the self is contaminated, and thereby annihilated.”

AwarenessRenderingHandSelf DelusionSketchUnknowableFormsDeus Absconditus
Book:Inward and Toward
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“The moon: in that luminous face one can behold those tired phases that bring only disappointment and no satisfaction; the impulses governing its expression remain patternistic, its cycles of transition easily predictable. With moderated temperament it commands the capricious sea: its diametric opponent, in whose helpless defiance, arises an empty, albeit elegant promise, an ever-changing flicker of reflected light, a simultaneous opening and closing of paths to be traversed, a vacillating hope and disillusionment in whose unsettling direction emerges something one might wish to call, even under the hardened visage of sky, a marginal sense of freedom. To walk upon the decks of ramshackle vessels rising and descending in patterns indeterminate, to lean in ecstasy over their shaky rails to witness the splendor of that which transforms immediately upon being witnessed and which transforms thereby the witness in question: it was these flights of reverie that appealed better to one’s imagination than the lean pragmatism of predictable transition.”

PatternsTransitionPredictabilityImpulsivenessMoon And Sea
Book:Inward and Toward
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“The sounds of my breaths slowly begin to fade away, and I can hear again the waves in the darkness. The waves again! Reverberating through a hollow tube. Focus inward, and ignore the sound! Ignore the cause. Think not upon the cause of that cause or upon that cause’s cause’s cause. There is more than we will ever be able to explain. More than I will ever know and observe, and thus our systems are riddled with gaps.”

BreathingCausalityDeus Absconditus
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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“The rocks are craggy/unmanageable without sufficiently lacerating my Self ~ scarcely solid ground, but more accurately a foothold. Yet in smoothness, the rocks are even less effective against the sweep of the tides than the sands of the shore. I sit here, not terribly concerned about the bruises and scrapes the jagged rocks lend in the moment, but concerned nevertheless by the waves that sweep back so effortlessly over the catchstones and eternally beyond reach—evading capture, leaving only a dissipating froth upon the black ridges to signal, at the very least, that 'it' happened: for whatever 'it' is worth. There is a distinctive tenor to this declaration of presence, this collapsing flow—Something that reminds me of...?—the reverberations of which remain beyond the span of cognition. Reverberations: there exists a memory of a memory of a dream I had once, but never an authentic rendering of the essential Moment. Still I can hear it in dreams of memories of memories of dreams. In dreams: a faint voice. A persona, a belief system distinctly its own, yet for now, the roar of the tides are a whisper ears strain to grasp. Seemingly a clue to a memory locked within. Or it’s all imagination: perhaps the sound of the ocean causes me to assume I’m remembering something. Gives the memory a sentience of its own and a vessel allowing it to surge in and ebb out. Yes, I’ve heard such things mentioned before: the stimulus that reverse engineers the very memory it is presumed to trigger. Still, it bothers me: this evasive, timeless notion.”

ImaginationDreamsAuthenticityOntologySimulationIllusion Of Memory
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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“There’s an overlapping echo of waves dancing in my brain, and I can hear amidst it also the skittering exodus of a thousand crustaceans over the shifting sands of Riptide. Are they exploring? Scavenging? Migrating possibly. I cannot see them in this darkness, yet hold in mind briefly the image of their silhouettes against the shimmering sea reflecting the crimson evening sky, and through this immersion it becomes difficult to know what is real...”

RealityDreamsPerceptionEchoesRiptideShifting Sands
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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“The fundamental basis by which the court’s decision might be made is, in itself, imperfect and subject to contradictions. There is very little consideration given to a priori knowledge regarding the circumstances being presented and as a result, arguments must be made empirically, under the assumption that assumptions themselves are, in fact, likely to give way to specious reasoning...Decisions must be made meticulously and according to specific, yet immeasurable criteria that can only be further manipulated by any cunning lawyer with the ability to make emotional pleas based on a requisite amount of inconsequential evidence to affect a decision beneficial to his clients. And so, in this respect, the law is capable of proving nothing except that its absurd attention to detail is really a kind of a façade meant to cover up the fact that a truly logical and just way to deal with such matters has not yet been devised. And the absence of adequate definition to its principles has given way to a kind of apathy among the men employed by the courts, who want nothing more now than to make a living for themselves and their families and not work themselves into too much of a frenzy about how little can be changed through their own initiative. Thus things aren’t likely to.”

LawCivilizationEvidenceContradictionApathyRule Of LawJustice SystemNatural LawSelf PreservationFacadeLegal SystemPathosInconsequentialA PrioriLegaleseEmpiricalHuman JusticeCivilized GovernanceComforting DelusionsRelevance Of PrinciplesEmotional PleasNon Legal EntityPolite FictionsSpecious Reasoning
Book:Don't Forget to Breathe
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“His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.”

LoveSufferingHatredDisappointmentIndifferenceBoredomBitternessNihilismLove And HatePassage Of TimeEnnuiBlack HumorIrony Of LifeGallows HumorAbsurdist FictionAshim ShankerInfinitudeDispassionNaughtProlonging LifeCosmic IronyOnly The Deplorable
Book:Only the Deplorable
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