It’s not what you lift, it’s where you carry it.
No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, overwhelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.
Everybody who really wants to knows what’s true. Most people just don’t want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don’t want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what’s true, inside. Listen.
Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth.
By the way, I do think that awareness is different from thinking. I am similar to most other people, I believe, in that I do not really do my most important thinking in large, intentional blocks where I sit down uninterrupted in a chair and know in advance what it is I’m going to think about... It doesn’t work like that for me.
Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young.
As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.
Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests.
No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.
He was trying to pay close attention to his surroundings as a way to avert thought and anxiety.
Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.
Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they’re venal and weak it’s because we are.
Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.
Gentlemen- by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism.
Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.
You can be at certain parties and not really be there.
We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.
This is what happens: you imagine the things I will say and then say them for me and then become angry with them. Without my mouth; it never opens. You speak to yourself, inventing sides. This itself is the habit of children: lazy, lonely, self.
There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps. Dolores describes these persons as afraid of obliteration, emotional engulfment. As if something truly and thoroughly felt would have no end or bottom. Would become infinite and engulf them.’ ‘Engulf means obliterate.