• 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

  • He was self-indulgent, a failure. He had not abandoned failure; it was his address, his street, his one comfort.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

  • “What do you do from morning to night?”

    “I endure myself.”

    The Trouble with Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • More than once, I have managed to leave my room, for if I had stayed there I could not be sure of being able to resist some sudden resolution. The street is more reassuring, you think less about yourself there.

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born