Open Road Media is publishing the works of Melanie Rae Thon—an intense and spiritual author who knows how to say and write the things that force us to think.
Here are five quotes from Thon that make us stop, drop, and question the meaning of human existence:
1. “We are all part of the jeweled net: nothing exists except by connection to everything else in the infinitely miraculous universe. We mourn intimate loss, the deaths of ones we love, the extinction of species, but we are exalted by the spiritual belief and scientific understanding that through time and across space everything changes and continues.” (From this interview)
2. “Every time you remember an episode of your life, you are reinventing it: embellishing, deleting, altering it through fusion and imagination. If you cannot imagine, you cannot remember.” (From this one)
{buybutton id=17177/}3. “You could lose it, your right big toe, leave it here, in this mud, your foot, your leg, and you wonder, how many pieces of yourself can you leave behind and still be called yourself?” (From her short story collection First, Body)
{buybutton id=17180/}4. “There's no way out of this story.
It must be told and told.
How can we know ourselves without it?”
(From her novel Sweet Hearts)
5. “You will die. But not tonight. Tonight the whole world is here alive inside you, everything you’ve loved and lost . . . The people whose stories you hear, the miraculous beings you encounter, have fallen inside, and now, before you die, you hope to learn to love them.” (From “The Heart Breaks, and Breaks Open: Seven Reasons to Tell a Story in 2011”)
Thinking deeply yet? Sound off below and try out some of Melanie’s other work here.