#disco

I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#reality #self-discovery #solitude #life

My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#discouragement #giving-up #grief #hopelessness #resignation

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living. ↗

— Elena Ferrante

#life #life

It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy [...] All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene. ↗

— Mark Twain

#nature #life

Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#discourse #thought #men

Discovery is the chance they never had, to tell, on oath, how wickedness infects a life. One’s only life. Beyond one’s will, evil comes, looking for a surprise soft spot, a place to inject its poison. ↗

— Kaimana Wolff

#on-oath #the-nature-of-evil #nature

Wrestling through her introspection has coloured  her views of life, people and relationships. And working it out, with all the excitement, pain and fear that went with it, has given her a strong sense of herself. She knows who she is because of it. Not only that: it has given her a strong bond to those who are also, in different ways and for different reasons, disconnected from society. ironically, she is connected to the Aaron's and Kyra's of this world by the fact that they are each of them disconnected. ↗

— Sarah Rayner

#introspection #self-aware #relationship

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. ↗

— David Hume

#discourse #empiricism #infinity #logic #religion

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness. ↗

— Aleister Crowley

#always #cleverness #discovering #fuss #magical

You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.' Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up. Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#heartbreak #loss #norfolk #rediscovery #search