#wall

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

Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer. ↗

— Patrick O'Brian

#unrequited-love #wallowing #love

Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage. ↗

— Morris West

#creature #experiences #his #man #nightmare

Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see. ↗

— John Gardner

#dreams #i #i see #myself #pale

Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#oranges-are-not-the-only-fruit #walls #nature

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#wallace-stevens #weather #religion

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#poetry #religion #wallace-stevens #weather #religion

I don't go to the cool, trendy restaurants. I go to either the holes in the wall or the super-fancy restaurants where there are no cool people. ↗

— Tyra Banks

#cool people #either #go #holes #i

Among these temples there is one which far surpasses all the rest, whose grandeur of architectural details no human tongue is able to describe; for within its precincts, surrounded by a lofty wall, there is room enough for a town of five hundred families. ↗

— Hernando Cortes

#among #architectural #describe #details #enough

Think about that for a moment. They died for you. Now take a good look at the life you're living and tell me: Did they do the right thing? ↗

— Mira Grant

#life #moral #right #value #wall