The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Milan Kundera (from Whiskey River)
Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.
Carl Gustav Jung (via darwinwoodka)
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Virginia Woolf (via mianoti)
Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew.
Julio Cortázar (via mianoti)
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
Paul Auster  (via devilduck & mianoti)
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
Frank Herbert
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde, “An Ideal Husband,” 1893 (via theshipthatflew)
I have always fought for ideas — until I learned that it isn’t ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.
 Margaret Anderson
And now here’s the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
Saul Bellow (from Whiskey River)
His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.
Elias Canetti (via aperfectcommotion)