The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

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"Even then, her words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z. Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the Es muss sein! to our own great love.
Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not Es muss sein (It must be so), but rather Es konnte auch anders sein (It could just as well be otherwise)."

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Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Readings In Social Psychology

"Doubts inevitably creep up about our effectiveness, about our approach, about the positions we assume or the actions we take.. But alongside the doubts, the uncertainty, and often the lack of visible results; we move forward..."
Andrea Ayvazian

The Sunset Limited

- How long 'd you felt like this..?
= All my life.
- Is that true?
= It's worse than that..
- .. I don't see what could be worse than that..
= Rage.. is really only for the good days.. The truth is there's little of that left..
The truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out.. They no longer have any content.. They are shapes only.
A train.. a wall.. a world.. a man..
A thing, dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void -no meaning to its life..
It's words.. Why would I seek out the company of such a thing..?

The Sunset Limited

Laughing Gas

"There's the heartache of the exile, sir. There's the yearning to be away from it all. There's the dull despair of living in the shallow, glittering life of this tinsel town, where tragedy lies hid behind a thousand false smiles."
Laughing Gas - P. G. Wodehouse

Berserk

"But.. my light isn't to be seen among them. Still.. after all this time.. it seems I'm just someone who stopped to warm himself at the bonfire in passing.

So long as I have my sword to fight with, I'm sure to survive. Year after year, I've proven it to be true... I've always survived, no matter the odds, no matter how hopeless a losing battle [may seem]. This time was no different.. In truth, I don't believe that's any way to live one's life.

I've been fighting in battles for as long as I can remember. The mercenary leader who raised me taught me nothing, except how to wield a sword. I've never had anything, except my sword.

I don't want to die.. for me that is the only reason I keep fighting. There is nothing to save myself for nor give myself to; I fight because I know nothing else. Once I was willing, to do just that, to commit myself to fighting, and let anyone else find a reason for me.."

[Berserk - Guts Monologue]

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Dad took his arm, walked him over and sat him down on the porch steps, relit his pipe. Puffing, he said, 'All right. Your mother's asleep. She doesn't know we're out here with our tomcat talk. We can go on. Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?'

'Since always.'

'Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter half the time he's covering up. He's had his fun and he's guilty. And men do love sin. Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colours, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn't just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that's your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I suppose it's thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can't let himself alone, won't lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.

'Oh, it would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all the time. But it's hard, right? With the last piece of lemon cake waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you be awake in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need tell you? Or, a hot spring day, noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear water like that miles away. So, minute by minute, hour by hour, a lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second, now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that's what the clock ticks, that's what it says in the ticks. Run swim, or stay hot, run eat or lie hungry. So you stay but once stayed, Will, you know the secret, don't you? Don't think of the river again. Or the cake. Because if you do, you'll go crazy. Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it's a lot missed out on. But then you console yourself, thinking, the more times in, the more times possibly drowned, or choke on lemon frosting. But then, through plain dumb cowardice, I guess, maybe you hold off from too much, wait, play it safe.

'Look at me: married at thirty-nine, Will thirty-nine! But I was so busy wrestling myself two falls out of three, I figured I couldn't marry until I had licked myself good and forever. Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. So at last I looked up from my great self-wrestling match one night when your mother came to the library for a book, and got me, instead. And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good halves together and you get one human all good to share between. That's you, Will, for my money. And the strange thing is, son, and sad, too, though you're always racing out there on the rim of the lawn, and me on the roof using books for shingles, comparing life to libraries, I soon saw you were wiser, sooner and better, than I will ever be..'

Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Hunter x Hunter quotes

"I trust you. And even if you end up turning on me, I won't blame you or regret my decision. Because I watched you, spoke to you, and decided to trust you.

But I'm not about to trust others just because you trust them. Do you understand?"

Meleoron - E102

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