Ivan Raykov

“The way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greatest depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

“It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.”
― Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

“And the secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life, the furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves, to take possession of the entire universe without letting the universe take possession of us and absorb us; it is the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else...”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“The best kind of classical performance is not a retreat into the past but an intensification of the present. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape.”
― Alex Ross, Listen to This