#well

He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too. ↗

— Hilary Mantel

#ghosts #history #thomas-cromwell #thomas-more #death

Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are likely to continue for generations after one is gone. ↗

— Frederick Buell

#death #environment #life #well-being #death

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels. ↗

— George Orwell

#communism #equality #marxism #orwell #poor

Positive energy is attracted to positive energy. ↗

— Deborah Day

#friendships #positive-thinking #well-being #friendship

Then, whenever I feel the sun on my face, I will think of you, " I told him. "You will always be with me, Bill. Because of all I have felt for you, and all I have learned from you. ↗

— Cornelia Maude Spelman

#friendship #relationships #william-maxwell #friendship

...and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty glasses the last humble tenements of the village, without a saddened heart. Scenes had passed in Uppercross which made it precious. It stood the record of many sensations of pain, once severe, but now softened; and of some instances of relenting feeling, some breathings of friendship and reconciliation, which could never be looked for again, and which could never cease to be dear. She left it all behind her, all but the recollection that such things had been. ↗

— Jane Austen

#feelings #going-away #memories #parting #recollections

I make money using my brains and lose money listening to my heart. But in the long run my books balance pretty well. ↗

— Kate Seredy

#books #brains #heart #i #listening

Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#goodbyes #life #parting #sad #life

I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#boswell #corrupt #corruption #freedom #johnson

You want to fall, that's all. You think it can't go on like that. It's as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can't go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can't. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes. ↗

— The Yellow Birds

#life