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What does “car” mean? A car in a showroom, a car heading straight toward me, a car needing constant repair, all have such isolated meanings that the name “car” cannot be said to stand for any one thing. That too is true of Scott or John or Gayle. God is in them only when God is in my mind. Only love can see steadily, consistently. Love makes one thing of all that it sees.

Hugh Prather, There is a Place Where You Are Not Alone

The necessary premise is that a man is somehow more than his “characteristics,” all the emotions, strivings, tastes and constructions which it pleases him to call “My Life.” We have ground to hope that a Life is something more than a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Sweet joy befall thee as in your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth and all you behold, tho it appears without, it is within,
In your imagination, of which this world of Mortality is but a shadow.

William Blake

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get rained out.

Satchel Paige

Once, in the Orient, I talked of suicide with a sage whose clear and gentle eyes seemed forever to be gazing at a never-ending sunset. “Dying is no solution,” he affirmed. “And living?” I asked. “Nor living either,” he conceded. “But, who tells you there is a solution?”

Elie Wiesel

The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our “emptiness” with children. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core

Adrienne Rich

Love is when I am concerned with your relationship with your own life, rather than with your relationship to mine. . . . There must be a commitment to each other’s well-being. Most people who say they have a commitment don’t; they have an attachment. Commitment means, “I am going to stick with you and support your experience of well-being.” Attachment means, “I am stuck without you.”

Stewart Emery

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Carl Jung