“It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other — for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended— the doors we had indiscreetly opened.”

— Henry James , book The Turn of the Screw

Source: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XIII.

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Henry James 154

American novelist, short story author, and literary critic 1843–1916

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“Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens us. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 54

“There is how we
were before, and how we are now, and the time between is spent choosing
which doors to open, and which to close.”

Karen White (1964) American writer

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“In our theory we have multiple “mini bangs” and these mini bangs are not mysterious like the big bang but they come because of the concentration of what we call negative energy fields. Whenever there are pockets of negative energy, they explode and produce a mini bang. We believe there’s a mini bang producing energy in the centre of quasars, which are very bright star like objects. Gamma ray bursts, which are the explosive creations of gamma rays, are another example of a mini bang. These are actually happening. These can be described by normal physics, but the big bang cannot. The big bang theory does not use any mathematical formulation so they can’t say why the bang occurred.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

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“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

We Bereaved (1929)

“And we danced;
Out there on that empty hardwood floor.
The chairs up and the lights turned way down low
The music played, we held each other close.
And we danced.Like no one else had ever danced before.
I can't explain what happened on that floor.
But the music played,
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And we danced.
Yeah, we danced.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

We Danced, written by Brad Paisley and Chris DuBois.
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“What the Big Bang theory tells us, is that at least our region of the universe 13.82 years ago, was an extremely hot, dense uniform soup of particles which in the conventional standard Big Bang model filled literally all of space—and now we certainly believe that it filled essentially all of the space that we have access to—uniformly. …This is contrary to a popular cartoon image of the Big Bang, which is just plain wrong. The cartoon image of the Big Bang is the image of a small egg of highly dense matter that then exploded and spewed out into empty space. That is not the scientific picture of the Big Bang. …If there was a small egg that exploded into empty space, you would certainly expect that today you would see something different if you were looking towards where the egg was, versus looking the opposite direction, but we don't see any effect like that. When we look around the sky the universe looks completely uniform, on average, in all directions, to a very high degree of accuracy… So we don't see a sign of an egg having happened anywhere. Rather, the Big Bang seems to have happened everywhere, uniformly.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

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“Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered, but a maze of passages, through which we must seek our way, lost and confused, now and again checked in a blind alley.
But always, if we have faith, a door will open for us, not perhaps one that we ourselves would ever have thought of, but one that will ultimately prove good for us.”

A. J. Cronin (1896–1981) Scottish novelist and physician

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“In short what I like to say is that the Big Bang says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged. It really has no bang in the Big Bang. It is a bangless theory, despite it's name.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

“Morning would come before we knew it. It always did. But we still had the night, and for now, we were together, so I just closed my eyes and drank it all in.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

“We live, we love. These are the choices we are given, to open doors or to close them. It is all we have, and it is enough”

Karen White (1964) American writer

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Henry James 154

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