• I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

    The Trouble With Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • Ama nesciri, says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this precept.

    The Trouble With Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • When you draw closer to God, your desire to be known diminishes.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me,

    The Trouble With Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • He who hates himself is not humble.

    The Trouble With Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

    Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
    Anne Lamott

  • He had achieved nothing. He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • Everything had left her—the innocence, the crying, the dutiful outings with her father, the life she had never lived. All these weigh something.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • “A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe. It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton

  • Because I am thinking so much about the past these days I have come to see that the past is always changing, is never static, never “placed” forever like a book on a shelf. As we grow and change, we understand things and the people who have influenced us in new ways.

    The House by the Sea: A Journal
    May Sarton