[banteringalong-blog]

'I thought I wanted a nice, normal life. I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane. You know?'

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

[banteringalong-blog]

'I'm not scared of falling,' he told himself. 'The part I'm scared of is where you finish falling.' But he knew he was lying to himself. It was the fall he was scared of--afraid of flailing and tumbling helplessly through the air, down to the rock floor far below, knowing there was nothing he could do to save himself, no miracle that would save him...

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

[banteringalong-blog]

So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

[banteringalong-blog]

Friend: Everyone's too worried about being fulfilled, they're so self-indulgent. It's there in the Declaration of Independence, and people think they should be happy. Happiness isn't the point.

Gretchen: Well now that our country has achieved a certain standard of prosperity, people set their goals on higher things. Isn't it admirable that people want to be happy? If happiness isn't the point, what is?

Friend: Working for goals like social justice, peace, or the environment is more important than happiness.

Gretchen: But you think it's important to help other people, to work for the benefit of others, and of course it is--but why? Why worry about children living in poverty or malaria in Africa unless, at bottom, it's because you want people to be healthy, safe, and prosperous--and therefore happy? If their happiness matters, doesn't yours?

[godzillaura-blog]

He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (via godzillaura)

[godzillaura-blog]

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.

Jane Austen, Persuasion (via godzillaura)

[banteringalong-blog]

This is my world My lover My point I gave myself, and gave and gave and gave I know myself That I gave myself And after all one passes One starts it all, all again I

João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

[banteringalong-blog]

If I could at last tell you what is in me, if I could shout: people! I have lied by pretending it was not there, It was there, day and night. Only thus was I able to describe your inflammable cities, Brief loves, games disintegrating into dust, earrings, a strap falling lightly from a shoulder, scenes in bedrooms and on battlefields. Writing has been for me a protective strategy Of erasing traces. No one likes A man who reaches for the forbidden. I asked help of rivers in which I used to swim, lakes With a footbridge over the rushes, a valley Where an echo of singing had twilight for its companion. And I confess my ecstatic praise of being Might just have been exercises in the high style. Underneath was this, which I do not attempt to name. This. Which is like the thoughts of a homeless man walking in an alien city in freezing weather. And like the moment when a tracked-down Jew glimpses the heavy helmets of the German police approaching. The moment when the crown prince goes for the first time down to the city and sees the truth of the world: misery, sickness, age, and death. Or the immobile face of someone who has just understood that he's been abandoned forever. Or the irrevocable verdict of the doctor. This. Which signifies knocking against a stone wall and knowing that the wall will not yield to any imploration.

"This" by Czeslaw Milosz

[banteringalong-blog]

Thinking is caring for the words. It gives a new value and use to the unused words.

João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

[banteringalong-blog]

To feel love Lonely love To follow desire in lonesomeness Love is the illusion of the abandoned

João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

[banteringalong-blog]

You can always try to solve a problem by proving that no solution exists.

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

[banteringalong-blog]

The days are long, but the years are short.

Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

[banteringalong-blog]

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.

William Butler Yeats

[banteringalong-blog]

The experience of illness seems to be intimately related to a sense of disorder, of loss of control, of things not being right with the world. In this sense, illness can be seen as a way of being in the world, as a loss of the familiar that pervades the way things are for someone.

Richard J. Baron, "An Introduction to Medical Phenomenology: I Can't Hear You While I'm Listening"

[banteringalong-blog]

I'm surrounded by plants, jade and Spathiphyllum and Beth's red red rose and daisies and tulips--a greenhouse, they put me in a greenhouse to heal me...

Jean Stewart, The Body's Memory

[banteringalong-blog]

When you break, examine the pieces. Let nothing go by. Transform the nightmare, make poetry of the dark.

Jean Stewart, The Body's Memory

[banteringalong-blog]

The only 'participation trophy' you're awarded from life is death. That's the one thing we all get just for showing up. In the meantime, if you want something better, you have to earn it.

Matt Walsh, "If I Can't Accept You at Your Worst, Then Maybe You Should Stop Being So Horrible"