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Once, in the Orient, I talked of suicide with a sage whose clear and gentle eyes seemed forever to be gazing at a never-ending sunset. “Dying is no solution,” he affirmed. “And living?” I asked. “Nor living either,” he conceded. “But, who tells you there is a solution?”

Elie Wiesel

The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our “emptiness” with children. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core

Adrienne Rich

Love is when I am concerned with your relationship with your own life, rather than with your relationship to mine. . . . There must be a commitment to each other’s well-being. Most people who say they have a commitment don’t; they have an attachment. Commitment means, “I am going to stick with you and support your experience of well-being.” Attachment means, “I am stuck without you.”

Stewart Emery

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

Carl Jung

The contrast between that bright blue and white Christmas-tree ornament and the black sky, that infinite universe, and the size and significance of it really comes through. It is so small and so fragile, such a precious little spot in that universe, that you can block it out with your thumb. You realize that everything that means anything to you — all of history and art and death and birth and love, tears and joys, all of it, is on that little blue and white spot out there which you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you have changed, that there is something new, that the relationship is no longer what it was.

Astronaut Russell Schewickart

“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said, in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability.

J. Krishnamurti

When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.

Pablo Picasso

Task: to be where I am. / Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd / role: I am still the place / where creation does some work on itself.

Tomas Tranströmer