#tent

That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren't enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until the day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at. ↗

— Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

#school #talents #math

A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#existentialism #future #hopelessness #weird

The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#nihilism #philosophy #theology #elections

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be? ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#christianity #existentialism #nihilism #atheism

What is the effect of unlimited coinage of silver in this country? and I invite your attention to this particularly, because it is a question of vital importance. ↗

— Richard Parks Bland

#because #country #effect #i #importance

Do more than is required. What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives and careers merely following? The extra mile. ↗

— Gary Ryan Blair

#achieves #between #careers #consistently #distance

The object of most prayers is to wangle an advance on good intentions. ↗

— Robert Brault

#good #good intentions #intentions #most #object

Whatever we are waiting for - peace of mind, contentment, grace, the inner awareness of simple abundance - it will surely come to us, but only when we are ready to receive it with an open and grateful heart. ↗

— Sarah Ban Breathnach

#awareness #come #contentment #grace #grateful

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#arbitrary #aside #believe #conception #even

It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read. ↗

— Anita Brookner

#hares #market #read #time #tortoise