Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.
—Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand
This gap, this distance (Cusk)
He was, in effect, manufacturing an illusion: no matter what he did, the gap between illusion and reality could never be closed. Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.
Rachel Cusk, Outline
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Destination
Where you thought you were going is the only impossible destination.
Labels: thought
A prompting (Cusk)
The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.
Rachel Cusk, Outline
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Those that are absurd (Pessoa)
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Fernando Pessoa
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Begins
It all begins when we interpret potential as promise.
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Easier
It is far easier to find someone saying what you need to hear than someone to listen to what you need to say.
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New tricks and treats (Grutter)
To find myself wrong is a triumph—not my brilliantly successful defense of yesterday's truth. That I endlessly can become wrong, is that not life's promise never to run out of new tricks and treats?
Theo Grutter, Dancing With Mosquitoes
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On society
Society depends upon learned helplessness.
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On deconstruction
Deconstruction is merely analysis without synthesis.
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The limits
The limits on what we know are set by the extent of what we think.
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Full (Yeats)
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
William Butler Yeats
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The only wealth (Grutter)
A collection of good relationships may be the only wealth worth striving for.
Theo Grutter, Dancing With Mosquitoes
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Who, indeed?
Who can recognize wisdom
who is not himself wise?
Labels: thought
To be alive
That's what it is to be alive,
to drift but insist you drive.
Labels: thought
Worth it?
It is well to do a thing well. But it doesn't relieve one of the responsibility of judging whether it is a thing worth doing.
Labels: thought
Refuge
If you seek a refuge, follow the refugees.
Labels: thought