To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I’ve only found sorrow.
~The Poisonwood Bible
I can’t explain why… but that quote made me think of this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBShN8qT4lk[/youtube]
This is a beautiful quote. It has great sublime poignance.
Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.
Lao Tzu
The universe does not exist ‘out there,’ independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.
— John Wheeler
“If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?”
“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
“The only true law is that which leads to freedom… There is no other.”
Jonathan Livinston Seagull 
I keep meaning to read this book, only because the name in the title is so close to my real name that I have been mistakenly called it (or had it written down in places by mistake) many times in my life. Occasionally, I still get post delivered to Jonathan Livinston too.
Read it! It’s a beautiful little book I read it a while back and I also listened to the tape which has background music. Awesome!! It had such a positive effect on me as a growth spurt. I love anything that has to do with flying/soaring/transcend. Who knows, maybe Richard Bach had you in mind when he wrote it. 
…towards death.
“[One has] been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the [one] who disagrees. [One has] have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the [one] who goes against the current. [One has] been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the [one] who stands alone.” - Ayn Rand
[“one” substituted for “man” to neutralize gender]
1st post! hi all! ~ tapu
From Lewis Lapham on violence, corporatism, and rugged individualism:
“Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.” [cf. Herbert Hoover and The Great Depression and the parallel parallex view of this one]
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
“A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.”
Well, death is our final destination, isn’t it though? But still I fly…like a dragon. If we’ve been given the wings, why would we Not use them?
“I say, if the Old Testament is right about the character of God, then we are all in big time trouble…”
- Mr. Gorbag
Don’t worry, be happy. 
Yeah…I suppose its better to fly towards death than to crawl towards it.
Pandora, I wasn’t specifically speaking about ‘flying towards death’. I was speaking of ‘flying’ or soaring in the sense of following one’s bliss or transcending one’s ‘limitations’, etc…
But why did you bring death into it?
To be sure of hitting your target, shoot first and call whatever you hit your target.
–found inside Chinese fortune cookie
“…thou can’t not stir a flower without troubling a star”
Francis Thompson
Believe it!!
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
(Teehaha)
“Keep calm and carry on”
-Unused British WWII propaganda poster
Wo Es war, so soll Ich werden.
~Sigmund Freud