What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others…And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.
Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape.
We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.
+ reality + people + want + image + projection + disappointment + love + desire
How strange it is, other people don’t have to do what I’m doing, yet they manage to like themselves enough to keep going. Why can’t I be like them? I don’t do this because I want to. I have to.
+ second star to the right + eating disorder + anorexia + bulimia + compulsion + need + drive + compelled + normal + people + others + have to
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
+ meaning + plot + life + purpose + existentialism + admit + people + reason + absurd + meaningless + atwood
Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
+ need + people + message + hear + care + alone + isolated + kurt vonnegut + comforting + thought
You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You’re one of the few who put up with me.
+ different + unlike + rest + talk + listen + attention + others + time + connection + present + conversation + people + distracted + vacant + ray bradbury
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
+ oscar wilde + passionate + people + friends + arists + suffer + beauty + artists + sorrow + interest + nobody
What’s depression like?,”he whispered. “It’s like drowning, except you can see everyone around you breathing.
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
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
Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.
+ book of disquiet + fernando pessoa + philosophy + nostalgia + feel + attached + life + reality + anxiety + fear + flight + people + tangible + sickness + mystery + death + meaning + nothingness + sad + disappear + faces + mean + symbolic + time + death anxiety + gone + nonexistent + grief
I always wondered why people were always doing things they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be anything. Then, the absolute second after you were born the tunnel narrowed down to about half that size. Then you started to grow up and everything you did closed in the tunnel some more. On and on through the years until you were stuck. And there you were. I figured that on the day you died, the tunnel would be so narrow, you’d have squeezed yourself in with so many choices, that you just got squashed.
+ Carol Rifka Brunt + Tell the Wolves I’m Home + actions + adult + behavoir + born + choices + doing + fear + future + grow up + huge + life + limit + limited + narrow + nothing + obligations + opportunity + people + routine + squashed + stuck + time + trapped + tunnel + years + depression + expectations + anxiety
If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being “asocial” or “irrational” in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.
+ understand + understood + people + behavoir + dictate + control + social + irrational + freedom + courage + self + nobody + explination + acts + hurt + independent + resent + erich fromm + philosophy
