Chris

“It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future I won’t be part of) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I’ll have my own kin, people who “understand” me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I’ll have already died long ago. I’ll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dead man’s lot in life. Perhaps one day they’ll understand that I fulfilled, like no one else, my instinctive duty to interpret a portion of our century; and when they’ve understood that, they’ll write that in my time I was misunderstood, that the people around me were unfortunately indifferent and insensitive to my work, and that it was a pity this happened to me. And whoever writes this will fail to understand my literary counterpart in that future time, just as my contemporaries don’t understand me. Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I weep because you cannot save people. You can only love them. You can’t transform them, you can only console them.”
― Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939

“Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

“Everything that is tearing us down today will become a memory, and this memory will be shared as an anecdote or a story or a poem or a play or a warning. It will be shared with another human being, who will then understand that he is not alone in his sadness. This is why we show up for others and tell our tales and listen to others. The great congregation meets daily, and you are someone’s angel today.

(In an Interview with James Grissom)”
― Tennessee Williams