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d97c7a0 I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal. College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed--maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it. good-intentions modernism existential-crisis japan novel introspection psychology Haruki Murakami
9e18943 There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd. grief life existential-crisis purpose Julian Barnes
e3d2b95 The bottom line was that he didn't want to die. As far as he was concerned, death was the problem. The basic human problem. Everyone's problem. He wasn't any different from anyone else, but there was no consolation in that. existential-crisis dying David Guterson