Jonathan Livingston Seagull

This was the first book I read of Richard Bach, way back in my college days. This book is a parable of a gull named Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The entire book is worth the read and it is definitely difficult to take out excerpts from this one to convey the true essence.

As you go on to read the book, you feel like you have experienced flying, amassing with you a lot of lessons for life. He does not just say it is ok to be different, but to look beyond one's horizons. It is a true transcendence experience.

"Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight --how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight."

"Most of us came along ever so slowly. We went from one world into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come from, not caring where we were headed, living for the moment. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose is to find that perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome."