Thursday Thirteen No. 7

Thirteen Quotations from Jonathan Livingston Seagull a novel by Richard Bach

This week I got my T13 inspiration from one of my favourite book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, it is about a seagull learning about life and flight. it is an uplifting book about finding the best in others and in ourselves. It can be read in an hour, it has only 93 pages and a third of it are photographs of seagulls in flight. The book was first published in 1970 and become a number one best seller. A heart-warming story that gives an extraordinary experience.

Here are 13 quotations from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

1. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.

2. We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.

3. The gull sees farthest who flies highest.

4. 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.

5. 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?

6. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.

7. The only true law is that which leads to freedom, Jonathan said. "There is no other."

8. But the speed was power and the speed was joy and the speed was pure beauty.

9. Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding.

10. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed.

11. Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight — how to get from shore to food and back again.

12. One day, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you shall learn that irresponsibility does not pay. Life is the unknown and the unknowable, except that we are put into this world to eat, to stay alive as long we possibly can.

13. Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anybody who wanted to discover it, that's got nothing to do with me. We're ahead of fashion maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.

To the real Jonathan Seagull who lives within us all.

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