Keeping Quotes (page 157)
The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation. I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine. That is , by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable. The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair. He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the...
Arthur Koestler
love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. if you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. but in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. it will not be broken; it will become impenetrable, irredeemable...to love is to be vulnerable
C. S. Lewis
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.
Saul Bellow
you're instantly in a bind once you arrive here on earth, of need, self-will, a body and a separate personality, even before teh crippling self-consciousness kicks in, even before the seventh grade ... you're fucked at cell division ... it's all downhill from there. After that, it's all survival, and trying to keep yourself either entertained or convinced that the things you're obsessed with are of any importance at all in the big scheme.
Anne Lamott
These really are our days, and we can prevail and overcome, even in the midst of trends that are very disturbing. If we are faithful the day will come when those deserving pioneers and ancestors, whom we rightly praise for having overcome the adversities in the wilderness trek, will praise today’s faithful for having made their way successfully through a desert of despair and for having passed through a cultural wilderness, while still keeping the faith.
Neal A. Maxwell
You, too!" it seemed to say, "you, too, shall taste of that peace and that unrest in a searching intimacy with your own self - obscure as we were and as supreme in the face of all the winds andall the seas, in an immensity that receives no impress, preservesno memories, and keeps no reckoning of lives.
Joseph Conrad