#do

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#craving #foreshadowing #lack #longing #loss

They have gone. And the tunnel is about to close. So, boys, I am looking for someone to blame. ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#koboi #opal #paradox #time #blame

It’s always hard to lose somebody. It leaves a hole in you heart that never grows back. ↗

— Kevin Brooks

#wisdom #loss

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising I came singing into the sun, sword unsheathing. To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall! ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#doubt

Boredom: the desire for desires. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#desire #desires

It's weird not to be weird. ↗

— John Lennon

#individualism #paradox #individuality

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#boredom #life #life

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#crisis #explorer #ideas #wisdom #consciousness

Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#wisdom #destiny

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#brooding #guilt #morality #remorse #repentance