#s

There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice. ↗

— Ulysses S. Grant

#determinism #freedom #will #freedom

They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#prisoners #science-fiction #freedom

If you do not have the possibility of abandoning your religion, you do not enjoy the possibility of freely embracing it, either. ↗

— Paul Berman

#freedom-of-religion #religion #freedom

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#david-foster-wallace #love #mental-illness #suicide #imagination

Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again. ↗

— Susanna Kaysen

#girl-interrupted #insanity #mental-illness #mental-illness

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#mental-illness #mental-illness

I'm like a stray cat. If you feed me, I don't leave. ↗

— Michelle M. Pillow

#cat #feeding #food #houseguest #humor

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of the meaning itself". ↗

— Joanne Greenberg

#mental-illness #mental-illness

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive. ↗

— Pat Barker

#mental-illness #ptsd #trauma #war #mental-illness

My heart keeps begging me for a reason to keep beating, but I'm running out of lies to tell it ↗

— Stephanie Ware

#mental-illness