"Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?"

"When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?"

-Douglas Coupland

Title-Chuck Palahniuk

Oy vey

We tell ourselves stories. We weave together different plot lines, wondering if the outcome of the story might be different were we to have done or said something other than what we had done or said, all the while knowing that the various alternative outcomes are just more stories - fictions meant to distract us from what's actually happening. And so we pause from weaving and commence breathing, gently and non-judgmentally saying hello to what is... Oy vey. -Chuck Lorre

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?



--Langston Hughes

"You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing."

‎"I'd lost my closest friends in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You are here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and reasons for loving them."

--Shantaram

"But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly"

"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight--isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you KNOW that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this".

--Jonathan Franzen
--The Corrections

I said no when I should have said yes

"How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes."

---Jonathan Franzen

...

"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get."