"Just lately I've been feeling like I don't belong, like the ground's not mine to walk upon"
“I’m wrecked,” she bragged, as though it took a special talent to get stoned. Lord, spare me these dimpled darlings who are always congratulating themselves on not having any thoughts or feelings.”
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.” Joan Didion
“It is books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
“At birth, they’d been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuck-ups. Had they chosen this? Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb? Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life-enders? In that first holy instant of breath/awareness (tiny hands clutching and unclutching), had it been their fondest hope to render (via gun, knife, or brick) some innocent family bereft? No; and yet their crooked destinies had lain dormant within them, seeds awaiting water and light to bring forth the most violent, life-poisoning flowers, said water/light actually being the requisite combination of neurological tendency and environmental activation that would transform them (transform us!) into earth’s offal, murderers, and foul us with the ultimate, unwashable transgression.” George Saunders, “Escape from Spiderhead”
“We were growing up. It was one of those moments when you could practically feel the adult pushing out, pushing forward into the world.”
—Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way
“Stop torturing yourself, her friends said. Stop living in the past. He was gone. Capital G—Gone. He wasn’t coming back. She should focus not on the pain, but on the possibility. Something good would come from all this heartache, something always did. Everything, her friends told her, happened for a reason. She should start looking for a silver lining. She thought she might start looking for new friends.”
—Aryn Kyle, Boys and Girls Like You and Me
“The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” David Foster Wallace
