#line

Time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty. ↗

— Dodie Smith

#death #horror #into #out #takes

Discipline is not always internalized and actually can breed resentment among children. ↗

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#always #among #breed #children #discipline

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#isolation #loneliness #modern-society #noise #peace

Hierarchy and discipline gave shape to the world;that was what he had always believed.Life was made easy by adherence toa rigid structure.But maybe that only really worked when you were at the top of the ladder,when you were doing well.The further down the rungs you went,the more of a victim of circumstances you became and the less it mattered whether or not you were in control. ↗

— James Lovegrove

#discipline #life #systems #age

Ook, though very clever, was the worst fighter in the tribe. That is how he ended up with Grot-Grot as his woman. Grot-Grot had a bald patch on the top of her head, she was missing an eye and she smelled like a dead skunk. She did have a good sense of humour though. ↗

— Aussiescribbler

#humor #ugliness #age

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#loneliness #sadness #life

Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#age

I have the not altogether unsatisfying impression that civilisation is collapsing around me. Is it my age, I wonder, or the age we live in? I am not sure. Civilisations do collapse, after all, but on the other hand people grow old with rather greater frequency. ↗

— Theodore Dalrymple

#civilization #decline #age

Like I said before, Rudy says, it's all about differences. Something about humans really doesn't like them, when they are the very thing we should embrace. If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares or angers you. ↗

— Chris Crutcher

#anger

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there. ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123] ↗

— Dani Shapiro

#anger