#de

Judy's friend that she has known the longest has just broken up with her boyfriend and is depressed. Judy likes her more now that she is depressed and feels unmotivated in life. Judy feels unmotivated in life. ↗

— Ellen Kennedy

#depression #life #life

So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#postmodernism #life

A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal. ↗

— Andy Grove

#career #journalism #lost #suddenly

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#life #life

Il zapacise pur si simplu multimea aceea nespus de pestrita, de parca diavolul faramase lumea bucati si le adunase apoi la loc, fara niciun sens, fara niciun rost. ↗

— Nikolai Gogol

#life #n-v-gogol #nevski-prospekt #world #life

Two distinctive traits especially identify beyond a doubt a strong and dominant character. One trait is contempt for external circumstances, when one is convinced that men ought to respect, to desire, and to pursue only what is moral and right, that men should be subject to nothing, not to another man, not to some disturbing passion, not to Fortune. The second trait, when your character has the disposition I outlined just now, is to perform the kind of services that are significant and most beneficial; but they should also be services that are a severe challenge, that are filled with ordeals, and that endanger not only your life but also the many comforts that make life attractive. Of these two traits, all the glory, magnificence, and the advantage, too, let us not forget, are in the second, while the drive and the discipline that make men great are in the former. ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#virtue #life

Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul. ↗

— Anita Shreve

#life

Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished. ↗

— Amelia Barr

#already #attempt #aware #events #fear

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism. ↗

— Gayle Rubin

#diversity #history #identity #labels #lesbian

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life? ↗

— W.G. Sebald

#life #meaning #understanding #work #writing