You do what you have to do to give people closure; it makes them feel better and it doesn't cost you much to do it. I'd rather apologize for something I didn't really care about, and leave someone on Earth wishing me well, than to be stubborn and have that someone hoping that some alien would slurp out my brains. Call it karmic insurance.
"They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling." "But it's true...I am, in the sense they mean--only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?" "What did they mean about you?" "Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality." --
Anger was better than feeling nothing; because anger and hatred were the long-lasting fuel in the endless dark of my despair. The same way that music had kept me from breaking.
And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled. I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well. The hunger. The desire. Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.
Just because your life isn't as awful as someone else's that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. You can't compare how you feel to the way other people feel. It just doesn't work. What might look like the perfect life - or even an okay life - to you might not be so okay for the person living it.
Nonsense has taken up residence in the heart of public debate and also in the academy. This nonsense is part of the huge fund of unreason on which the plans and schemes of optimists draw for their vitality. Nonsense confiscates meaning. It thereby puts truth and falsehood, reason and unreason, light and darkness on an equal footing. It is a blow cast in defence of intellectual freedom, as the optimists construe it, namely the freedom to believe anything at all, provided you feel better for it.
"I can see why some people become "beach bunnies": you don't have to think about things or even talk when you're on the beach. You just sit here and feel good about being alive."
Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory and personal history abide. -Thomas Moore
Is this what comes at the end, I wondered? Maybe death is the great equaliser, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
Stranno e, che vsichki greshki sv'rshvat ednakvo, che vinagi gi povtariame i prod'lzhavame s novi nadezhdi. Tsiala noshch khapem ustni, kh'ltsame v'v v'zglavnitsata s bezpomoshchen gniav i tv'rdo se zaklevame da ostanem samotni, a shchom s'mne, podnasiame dushata si kato nezhen balon ot ts'fnalo glukharche na nasreshchnite vetrove na zhivota i te go roniat i raznasiat. Ala koito spasi samo edno malko pukhche i go vnese na zavet, toi e spasil tsialata si dusha. Tova e gorchiva rabota, no koito ne obr'shcha nezhnoto tsvete na dushata si k'm vetrovete na izpitaniiata, dori tsialoto da go spasi i da go prenese dokrai, toi ne mozhe da pochuvstva, che izobshcho niakoga go e imal.