#path

Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity. ↗

— Leon Kass

#child #copy #could #dead #even

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. ↗

— Soren Kierkegaard

#else #embryo #exposed #grandiose #great

Hobbits always so polite, yes! O nice hobbits! Smeagol brings them up secret ways that nobody else could find. Tired he is, thirsty he is, yes thirsty; and he guides them and he searches for paths, and they saw sneak, sneak. Very nice friends, O yes my precious, very nice." Sam felt a little remorseful, but not yet trustful. "Sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, but you startled me out of my sleep. And I shouldn't have been sleeping, and that made me sharp. But Mr. Frodo, he's that tired, I asked him to have a wink; and well, that's how it is. Sorry. But where HAVE you been to?" "Sneaking," said Gollum, and the green glint did not leave his eyes. ... "Hullo, Smeagol!" Frodo said. "Found any food? Have you had any rest?" "No food, no rest, nothing for Smeagol," said Gollum. "He's a sneak." "Don't take names to yourself, Smeagol," Frodo said. "It's unwise, whether they are true or false." "Smeagol has to take what's given to him," answered Gollum. "He was given that name by kind Master Samwise, the hobbit that knows so much. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#frodo-baggins #gollum #hobbit #lord-of-the-rings #name

The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic. ↗

— James Thurber

#between #brutal #decadence #difference #our

My teenage years were exactly what they were supposed to be. Everybody has their own path. It's laid out for you. It's just up to you to walk it. ↗

— Justin Timberlake

#everybody #exactly #just #laid #out

We were united not only by political respect for each other, but also by deep mutual sympathy as people. ↗

— Helmut Kohl

#deep #each #mutual #only #other

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#character #empathetic #genre #get #involvement

Once he had selected the path he was going down he really had to stick with it in a 16 game match. He had to try and hit in the one direction but unfortunately for him - though fortunately for me! - he hit in the wrong direction. ↗

— Vladimir Kramnik

#down #fortunately #game #going #had

Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering—I have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella’s minds aren’t oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I’ve done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn’t hear them calling my name. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#empathy #ethics #politics #food

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim’s own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another... ↗

— Jon Ronson

#experimental #lsd #nudity #psychopath #psychotherapy