Quote,Unquote

My pleasant encounters with the written word

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Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.

- EB White

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Loneliness

Is a form of longing

It is also an illusion

Of community

And reckoning

There is no soul

… To hold you

… To witness you

You are as non-existent

As the void inside

And out

Loneliness is a disease

Afflicts philosophers

And those who

Seek truth …

Over all pursuits

Amidst all pursuits

Truth of a moment

A sensation

Ideas traded for

Dreams

And desires

Loneliness is a trap

An endless spiral

Of swirling meanings

An endless disintegration

Of meanings past

Loneliness is the truth

Underneath all thoughts

Masquerading as…

Ideas of purpose

Of self

Of morality

Loneliness is restlessness

Of a mind that never stops

Fears of darkness

And echoes of silence

Loneliness is a scream

And an imagined vision

Of eternal time

Without a mirror…

To amplify

To reflect

To validate

A reality as truth

Loneliness can also be

Shame… of a relentlessly

Racing mind

Trapped in a labyrinth

Loneliness can also be

Freedom… of acceptance

And letting it all be

Because it is what it is

And you are that

Loneliness is wisdom

Unanchored

Uprooted

Dismembered

Loneliness is tracing

Lines of time

And carrying the grief

Of suffering

And the curse

Of human existence

Loneliness is being stuck

In the middle

Without boundaries and

With Endless empathy

With Knowing and

Not inhabiting

Loneliness is an electric buzz

Of a floating electron

Heard when all senses die

In the inner ear

Of waking life

Loneliness is the reverberation

Of a dream

And seeing its truth

Long after its disappearance

Loneliness

Is a form of longing

- Ranjana Raghunathan @ranjanaraghu

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Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once

-Marcus Aurelius

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Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.

Anaïs Nin

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There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

- Erich Fromm

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“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”

Leonard Cohen

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“It’s easy to live as an atheist. It’s hard to die as one”

- Line from the film “Ice Road: Vengeance”

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Identity is Addictive.

We build entire lives around who we think we are. And then we protect that conceptualization at all costs. But identities are just stories.

When feeling like you need to win, prove, or defend—pause.

Try asking yourself: “What part of me am I defending right now?”

-Dan Harris

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Source : https://x.com/joseph_fasano_/status/1904967210084282463?s=46

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By virtue of the infinite laws, or the laws of infinity that lie beyond what we can reach, God cannot but exist. For man, who is unable to grasp the essence of what lies beyond, the unknown-the unknowable is GOD. And in a moral sense, God is love.

Man has to have an ideal in order to be able to live without tormenting other people. An ideal as a spiritual, ethical concept of

Morality is within a person. Ethical precepts are something external that have been thought up in place of morality. Where there is no morality, ethical precepts hold sway-bankrupt and worthless.

Where morality exists there is no call for precepts.

The ideal is unattainable, and in its understanding of this phenomenon lies the greatness of human reason.

The attempt to present something attainable and specific in the guise of the ideal subverts common sense, it is a way to madness.

Man is estranged. It might seem that a common cause could become the basis of a new community; but that is a fallacy. People have been stealing and playing the hypocrite for the last fifty years, united in their sense of purpose, but with no community. People can only be united in a common cause if that cause is based on morality and is within the realm of the ideal, of the absolute.

That is why labour can never in itself be elevating. That is why there is such a thing as technical progress. If labour were a moral category, a valour, then progress would be reactionary, which would be absurd.

- Excerpt from “Time within Time” by Andrei Tarkovsky

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What an inspired idea is the notion of infinity in juxtaposition with the brief span of human life. The very concept is infinite. Not that I am convinced so far that man is the yardstick of this whole con-struction. What about plants? There is no yardstick. Or maybe it is everywhere-in each tiny particle of the universe. That would not be too good for man; there's a lot he would have to give up; nature would not need him. At least on Earth, man has realized that he is standing face to face with infinity.

Or perhaps it's just a muddle? After all, nobody can prove that there is a meaning. On the other hand, of course, if someone were to prove it (to himself, naturally) he would go off his head. His life would become meaningless.

H. G. Wells has a story called The Apple, about how people were frightened to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge. It's a brilliant

- Excerpt from “Time within Time” by Andrei Tarkovsky

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(Excerpt from Ryan Holiday’s conversation with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project podcast)

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“The meaning of immortality is that we have to live with what we’ve done for eternity”

“Time is the greatest of all warriors. What it doesn’t destroy it alters beyond recognition. Time tears down everything. We brace our backs against the void, desperate to hold on to the past, to our ghosts, to ourselves.”

(Dialogues from Altered Carbon)

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“He felt the weight of the days, each one a new test of endurance, not in dramatic acts but in the quiet, necessary rituals of care. Every morning was another cycle, a reset, where the smallest shift in mood could feel like either victory or surrender.”

“She carried the days like stones in her pockets—not heavy enough to stop her, but enough to feel with every step. The rhythm of waking, of tending to herself, was both comforting and exhausting, as if each act was building something unseen. Though she longed for a finish line, there was a quiet understanding that the journey itself was the point, and in that, there was a strange sort of peace.”

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"The hypocrisy of being human; the constant tug between solitude and company, the desire to love so desperately and simultaneously be detached from it all, of wanting everything and wanting nothing."

- Muhammad Usama

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So strange this life…

Just a dream of a dream.

(Dialogue from the tv series “Shogun”)