“We accept the love we think we deserve.”

Perks of Being A Wallflower

That quote changed my life. I left my abusive boyfriend and took a giant leap towards happiness.

> There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

I was really struggling with anxiety and depression at the time, and anxiety and depression over my anxiety and depression, and this quote helped contextualize some of those feelings for me. It made me feel better about the fact that I was going through a hard time, like there was something I could learn from the experience, but also served as a reminder that focusing on my negative feelings would just make things worse.

Not saying the quote like cured my depression, but it was very helpful to me in a difficult time.

The author who benefits you is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been struggling for utterance in you. Oswald Chambers

Someone who can put words onto the "feeling" you know is true, but you can't explain it.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

This is from Frank Herbert's Dune. I found it when I was really torn on moving back home from abroad. It's still and excellent reminder when I'm indecisive. 🙂

There are others, but it would take me a while to list them all. This one just stands out the most I think, cause it's connected to a difficult time in my life.

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.

• Albert Camus

Unfortunately, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

When you're a teenager used to everybody telling you how smart you are and you're reading books like this it's very easy to imagine yourself as this sort of uber-competent, hyper-focused robot dedicated to Work, and so you think you are the kind of person this ideology is made for. "I'd be able to be super rich and influential so long as I don't let the parasites get in my way!"

It's taken me 2 decades and a lot of humble pie to realize how absolutely shitty those books and that worldview are. Looking back on it, those books were absolute poison that gave me such a shitty outlook on life and other people that it became almost impossible to function in the real world.

Maps of our Spectacular Bodies had so many beautiful quotes that really hit home when I needed it.

"It's possible to appreciate the beauty of a shard of glass without knowing how the window looks before it was smashed or what the moment of shattering was like."

"I'm going to tend the little garden. It may not be the garden I wanted and exactly the flowers I planted, but it is my little garden and I'm going to do my best."

"Judge yourself entitled to any word or action which is in accord with nature, and do not let any subsequent criticism or persuasion from anyone talk you out of it. No, if it was a good thing to do or say, do not revoke your entitlement. Those others are guided by their own minds and pursue their own impulses. Do not be distracted by any of this, but continue straight ahead, following your own nature and universal nature: these two have one and the same path."

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It's astounding that some things have not changed for millennia and exactly what I needed at the time.

"We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes its run over, so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over." Fahrenheit 451

I read this as I was writing a letter to my best friend who was preparing to move to Australia.

Seemed very appropriate when "summing up" our friendship.

“I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

From Little Bee by Chris Cleave. It still makes my breath catch in my throat.

My absolute favourite author:

“Morpheus: It is sometimes a mistake to climb. It is always a mistake never even to make the attempt... If you do not climb you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fall, that hard to fall? Sometimes you wake, and sometimes, yes, you die. But there is a third alternative."

Todd, upon waking: "Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall...you fly.” Neil Gaiman, Sandman

I read that when I was around 21/22 and it hit me hard because I would often let fear stop me from doing things.

I just read Elton John’s autobiography and I loved it. He’s had a pretty wild life and lots of issues stemming from a difficult childhood with insanely cold parents. He spent like sixteen years drugged out and it took a long time and almost dying for him to get sober. He finally found a meaningful life and happiness with his now husband at a mature age. So in a way he wasted a lot of time being drugged, unhappy, wracked with anxiety etc, but he also says something like “maybe I had to go through all that to get to where I am now”. Sorry, he said it much more eloquently but you get the point.

Anyway, it spoke to me because while I’ve not led a crazy rockstar life, I’m approaching middle age and I do have some regrets about not living life to the fullest so to speak. I also suffer from anxiety and it has held me back in many ways and caused issues in relationships etc. At the same time, I do feel like there was no other way and I’m slowly getting to know myself and what I need to be happy, but it just wouldn’t have been possible at a younger age because I didn’t really have the emotional support and guidance as a child/adolescent to get there earlier. So I had to go through some shit to get to where I am, where I feel like I’m on the brink of something great because I finally know myself and I’m settling into this peace that comes with age and experience if you’re open to it and open to working on yourself.

"Even after two years, he was still in thrall with just being at Waseda, with just having a quiet room to read in.

If anything, he wanted a very simple life filled with nature, books, and perhaps a few children. He knew that later in life, he also wanted to be let alone to read and to be quiet."

~Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee

(I read this in Polish so I don't know what the proper English translation of this quote is) I was reading The New Gods by Emil Cioran while having my depressive episode and constantly analyzing my past (former gifted child here) not knowing where to go next. I was extremely confused and then this sentence came to me:

>my memory is cluttered with the remains of shattered horizons

and I thought then that I couldn't describe my state of mind any better. It helped me sort some things out in my head.

When I first started therapy, I randomly came across the line “…making the best relationship you can with the worst parts of yourself” in Women Who Run with the Wolves.

"Doing better next time. That's what life is."

-Joe Abercrombie, Before they are Hanged

Say one thing about Logen Ninefingers, say he knows how to keep moving forward.

The older I get the easier it becomes to dwell on the mistakes I've made or things I could have done differently, but this really helped me get out of feeling discouraged. There is always a next time if you're willing to try for it.

"I was not in love but felt a tender curiosity"-Nic Carraway from the great Gatsby This quote just describes my love life

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too ut there will be no special hurry. Ernest Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms

Especially -- The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places... Such a true thing, many are not stronger, just more or less broken. It's such a corrective to that nonsense that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

I grew up as someone with very little cultural or historical identity - a white kid born in a settler colonial nation, with no real connection to my country or language of origin, decidedly unreligious and raised by parents with few strong political or social beliefs. All that nothingness can leave you pretty hollow, especially as I became an adult and realized that I had no true community or sense of connection to the world around me. It was Robert Macfarlane's Underland that first genuinely reached out and grounded me, validated the intense inexplicable emotion I've always felt when confronted with the scope and breadth of human history. Macfarlane was the first person besides myself to express the same kind of overwhelm I experience in those moments, and made me realize that the profound loneliness I've felt without a community around me is unfounded - I belong to a species that has lived and died and loved and fought and cooked and eaten and created for hundreds of thousands of years, and none of us are ever truly alone. I could honestly quote the entire book, but here's one from the very beginning that touched me so profoundly:

>I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that 'the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright.' The intimacy of that posture is moving to me - the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the cave walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from within the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble and I hope you enjoy :)

Hard times are indeed hard times and are always a real test, but we indeed become stronger and closer. Mine is not exact from a book, but from one of my favorite book writers. It’s simple, but helped me a lot last year when I started to draw for a living:

“Be pleasant to people Do good work Deliver work on time”

Neil Gaiman

> "Now I understand", said the last man.

Arthur C Clarke, Childhood's End

I first read this in highschool, and it has always stuck with me. There are arguably many interpretations, but I've always viewed it as a poignant reminder of the importance of humility.

I just read Fahrenheit 451 for the first time, and holy crap was it powerful. Makes me scared for our future.

I picked up Looking For Alaska when i moved away to a small college. The school was very similar to the one described in the book. >!At the end of the first semester, a girl died in a car crash on her way home, leaving the student body completely shaken.!<

I've never had a book speak my experience so closely and profoundly.

“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. They all seemed like such nice people" -The Sun Also Rises

My wife was in the hospital at the time, and later would he again in a much worse way (shes better now). But this feeling of a once close group of people about to show themselves seemed scary and her parents did seem like such nice people.

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land.

"I dream she is alive even now, but there is nothing to give weight or value to that, it is only me, and what I want to be true. It is only longing."

A Brightness Long Ago - Guy Gavriel Kay

I found a 20+ hour audio book called "He Who Fights With Monsters" 2 days before I had to drive 20+ hours.

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“Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Did you like the book? It's on my TBR and I was intending to get to it soon.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

>I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.

and

>You know what's the most terrifying thing about admitting that you're in love? You are just naked. You put yourself in harm's way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe that the other person loves you back.

There are many, many more, but those are the ones that really stay in my head.

Elsewhere- Gabrielle Zevin, I know it’s a youth book. It was on my shelf forever never read my friend recommended it right after my dad passed but I didn’t recently pick it up until about 5 years later… I’m glad it found me when it did. It would have been too much for me to read right after he died, it gave me comfort at this point in my grief. I love that book.

At a time when I was trying to come to terms with my place in the world I ran into this quote at the start of a book. It still rings so true.

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.” Marcel Proust

What - Virginia Woolf: As a woman, my country is the whole world.

When - Every day I see it.

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Jane Eyre

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

PAUL Atreides

Frank Herbert's Dune

“love your solitude and turn the distress it brings you into resonant laments”

-Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke

This whole book is a gem, along with Duino Elegies

"All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope" The Count of Monte Christo

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"