Grace M

“33. It's normal to feel pain in your hands and your feet, if you're using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal -- if he's living a normal human life.
And if it's normal, how can it be bad?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl's of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it -- it went on increasing in his experience.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“A.- I'm not sure about good and evil at all anymore.
Q. - Is that a bad sign in itself?
A.- Not necessarily.
Q.- What would be the test of corruption?
A. - Becoming really insincere -- calling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state that they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood -- she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Is there an infinite outside of us? Is this infinite, one, inherent, permanent; necessarily substantial, because it is infinite, and because, if matter were wanting to it, it would in that respect be limited; necessarily intelligent, because it is infinite, and because if it lacked intelligence, it would be to that extent, finite? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we are able to attribute to ourselves the idea of existence only? In other words, is it not the absolute of which we are the relative?”
― Victor Hugo, Les Miserables