I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip one hour more of sleep and live.
Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.
+ life + reality + artist + living + words + color + silently + private + perspective + henry miller
She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her.
You do anything long enough to escape the habit of living until the escape becomes the habit.
+ Escape + life + habit + addiction + cycle + living + eating disorder + bulimia + anorexia + stuck + entrenched + darkness + labyrinth
I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.
+ charles bukowski + interests + life + lacking + inferior + deficient + wrong + defective + escape + get away + normal + strange + people + understand + different + place + taste + living + purpose + existentialism + ham on rye
My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all.
Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.
+ Life + normal + people + cope + living + struggle + depression + eating disorder + chaos + make it + body + hours + days + experience + anxiety
The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
+ depression + death + meaning + meaningless + life + living + routine + sameness + everyday + music + boring + incessant + strength + escape + insecure + madness + nothingness + necessity + nothong + being + louis ferdinand celine + philosophy + suicide + pointless + dread + tomorrow + end + earth + destiny + night
It’s precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive - or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself.
+ haruki murakami + pain + suffering + depression + despair + overcome + fight + recovery + living + feeling + alive + experience + time + awakening + awareness + sense + action
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going
+ life + memory + past + moment + mindful + existentialism + philosophy + living + time + pass + awareness + alive + mind
I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
+ enjoy + moments + retrospect + reflective + living + past + looking back + thinking + memories + david foster wallace + dfw + mindful + time + happening + depression + head + mind + replay
How wonderful to be alive”, he thought. “But why does it always hurt?
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
+ living + real world + world + being + life + normal + different + good + skilled + anne tyler
When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t begun- that “life” is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays- whenever. But 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- that scrambly madness- all that time I had before.
I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.
+ isolated + different + fit in + alone + lonely + meaningful + world + people + society + living + apart + a separate peace + john knowles
