What if a demon were to creep after you one day or night, in your loneliest loneness, and say : "This life which you live and have lived, must be lived again by you, and innumerable times more. And there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh - everything unspeakably small and great in your life - must come again to you, and in the same sequence and series...". Would you not throw yourself down and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment, in which you would answer him : "Thou art a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!"
- Frederick Nietzsche, "The Gay Science", 1882

The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a night.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Jenseits von Gut und Bose, IV, 157."

You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing-- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
- Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"

Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
- Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"

What did I want?
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.
I had had one chance - for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be - and I had known it - and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.

- Robert A. Heinlein, "Glory Road"

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.
~Emily Dickinson

Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.
---The Medieval World View By William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
- - - Henri Nouwen "Out of Solitude"

"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, `What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, `Oh, nothing' and then you go and do it. It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
--Winnie the Pooh

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.
--Madelein L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet)

O for a muse of fire
That would ascend the brightest heaven of invention
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!"
- Henry V, Act One, Scene One

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
Any direction you choose.
You're on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy
Who'll decide where to go.
--Dr. Seuss Oh, the Places You'll Go!

"I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in work-the chance
to find yourself. your own reality-for yourself, not for others-what no
other man can ever know."
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists - I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt."
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Women

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show..."
-Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were
and the person you become. There are no maps of the change.
You just come out the other side. Or you don't.
- Stephen King, "The Stand"

"We had the stars up there," said Huck, "And we use to lie on our backs and look up at them and discuss 'bout whether they was made or just happened. Jim he allowed that the stars was made, but I allowed they just happened."
--Mark Twain, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire
cat in a tree.'Which road do I take?' she asked.
'Where do you want to go?' was his response.
'I don't know,' Alice answered.
'Then,' said the cat, 'it doesn't matter.'"
-- Lewis Carroll, From Alice in Wonderland

"Since that moment it is all up with me. My last remaining shreds of
happiness and self-confidence have been blown to the winds, I can do no
more. Yes, I am unhappy; I freely admit it, I seem a lamentable and
absurd figure even to myself. And that I cannot bear. I shall make an
end of it. Today, or tomorrow, or some time, I will shoot myself.
My first impulse, my first instinct, was a shrewd one: I would make copy
of the situation, I would contribute my pathetic sickness to the swell
of literature of unhappy love. But that was all folly. One does not die
of an unhappy love affair; one revels in it. [ . . . ] But what is
destroying me is that hope has been destroyed with the destruction of
all pleasure in myself.I cease to write, fling the pen from me -- full
of disgust, full of disgust! I will make an end of it -- alas, that is
an attitude too heroic for a dilettante. In the end I shall go on
living, eating, sleeping; I shall gradually get used to the idea that I
am dull, that I cut a wretched and ridiculous figure."

-Thomas Mann, The Dilettante, in Stories of Three Decades

What stillness in this predawn hour. The air is cold. In all our life of preparation we are unprepared for this new hour filled with emptiness. How thick the darkness behind which hides the animal cry. I know what is there, hidden from my stare. Grief's weeping. Deeper emptiness.

Grief wails like a scarecrow in the wild night, beckoning the wind to clothe his gaunt shell. With his outstretched arms he is gathering eyes for his disguise. I had not known that Grief had such gentle eyes--eyes reflecting my uncle's eyes, my mother's eyes, all the familiar lost eyes of Love that are not his and that he dons as a mask and a mockery.

This body of grief is not fit for human habitation. Let there be flesh. The song of mourning is not a lifelong song.

from Obasan By Joy Kogawa