SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: DESPONDENCY

  • I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within. People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour—put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • This morning I woke at four and lay awake for an hour or so in a bad state. It is raining again. I got up finally and went about the daily chores, waiting for the sense of doom to lift—and what did it was watering the house plants. Suddenly joy came back because I was fulfilling a simple need, a living one. Dusting never has this effect (and that may be why I am such a poor housekeeper!), but feeding the cats when they are hungry, giving Punch clean water, makes me suddenly feel calm and happy.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • Therefore, meditating upon these things, and considering how great is the reward for a painful and toilsome life, rejoice and be glad, since from your youth you have trod a path full of a myriad of crowns, making profit through your continual and multitudinous sufferings. For bodily infirmity, in all its various forms, is more grievous than a myriad of deaths, since without ceasing it continually beleaguers you. Being showered with abuses and outrages; bearing calumnies against yourself without a pause; being overwhelmed with continual, extreme sadness; and having fountains of tears throughout all this time-each one of these trials is sufficient by itself to procure great advantage to those who endure such things patiently.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • After endless depression, nights without sleep, realization that the life he had entered was calamitous, without hope, he slowly became lucid, even calm. He was able to read and think. The days dawned quietly. I am through it, he thought. Like the survivor of a wreck, he took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed. He was in a period of contentment with daily life, of peace. He looked about himself gratefully. It was still not completely real to him, it was a kind of scenery he watched like someone on a train, some of it vivid, going by, some of it bare.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • The best way to heal yourself? Heal others.

    Bittersweet
    Susan Cain

  • But he took his belief that life wasn’t worth living and turned it on its head, asking what would make life worthwhile after all—what a single human could do to benefit humanity.

    Bittersweet
    Susan Cain

  • We should strive “to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

    Bittersweet
    Susan Cain