comfort things

“How fragile we are, between the few good moments.” –Jane Hirshfield

[comforthings]

Going down to Florence, I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It's not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

We need not banish our melancholy, but we must destroy our taste for difficult and fatal things.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

I must express what fills my heart, and express it quickly.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

In our youth, we attach ourselves more easily to a landscape than to a man. It is because landscapes allow themselves to be interpreted.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

The need to be right—the sign of a vulgar mind.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

Culture: the cry of men in the face of their destiny.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

One must not cut oneself off from the world. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. My whole effort, whatever the situation, misfortunate or disillusion, must be to make contact again.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

[comforthings]

The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life, the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.

Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

[comforthings]

Shyness feeds into some of the stuff that you need as a fiction writer. Like: part of the shyness for me is, it's very easy for me to play this game of, What do you want? What will the effect of this be on you? You know? It's this kind of mental chess. Which in personal intercourse? Makes things very difficult. But in writing, when I think a lot of what you're doing—there are very few innocent sentences in writing. You've gotta know not just how it looks and sounds to you. But you've gotta be able plausibly to project what an alien consciousness will make of it. So that there's a kind of split consciousness that I think makes it difficult to deal with people in the real world. For a writer. But that actually comes in handy.

David Foster Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

[comforthings]

We're absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there's some kinds of escape—in a sort of Flannery O'Connorish way—that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are other kinds that say, "Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name is David Wallace, that you have a pimple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due."  And that's fine, in low doses. But that there's something about the machinery of our relationship to [entertainment] that makes low doses—we don't stop at low doses.

David Foster Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

[comforthings]

I had no idea that 90 percent of what I was getting out of books I really loved was this sense of a conversation around loneliness.

David Foster Wallace, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

[comforthings]

But I know All this dark won't swallow All the light I hide But still host

The Receiving End of Silence by Wanderers

[comforthings]

Evil is sometimes like a tool in your hand, recognized or unrecognized, you are able, if you have the will to do it, to set it aside, without being opposed.

Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

[comforthings]

The spirit only becomes free at the point where it ceases to be invoked as a support.

Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

[comforthings]

The world is only ever a constructed world.

Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms