#her

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad. ↗

— Lev Grossman

#cowardice #fear #martial-heroics #physical-violence #playing-dead

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth!" "No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly. The Brothers Karamazov Ivan to Alyosha, Book V - Pro and Contra, Chapter 4 - Rebellion ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#god #religion #suffering #the-brothers-karamazov #theodicy

With the possible exception of the higher reaches of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, one can scarcely imagine anything more inhuman than philosophy. Its worship of logic in all its cold, crystalline purity; its determination to stride the bleak and icy mountaintops of theory and abstraction: to be a philosopher is to be existentially deracinated. Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement. ↗

— Mark Rowlands

#imagination

It's okay,” he said. “We're together.” He didn't say you're okay, or we're alive. After all they'd been through over the last year, he knew that the most important thing was that they were together. She loved him for saying that. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#annabeth-chase #heroes-of-olympus #inspirational #love #percy-jackson