#nat

You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. ↗

— Andrew Solomon

#cognition #depression #future #issues #judgment

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can. ↗

— William Faulkner

#happiness #optimism #suffering #optimism

The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour. ↗

— Kenneth Rexroth

#society #nature

Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone. ↗

— Caitlín R. Kiernan

#morality #pragmitism #men

Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' gold And like the sky my soul is also turnin' Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind ↗

— Ray Lamontagne

#epiphany #gold #heart #moving-on #redemption

Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today. ↗

— Malcolm X

#knowledge #tolerance #understanding #tolerance

The best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is the imagination. ↗

— Homer W. Smith

#evolution #science #imagination

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination. ↗

— Anthony Burgess

#j-g-ballard #literature #science-fiction #writing #imagination

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#politics #religion #imagination

But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have? ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#imagination