Breanna Dickson

“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he
only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to
cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will
exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can
look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all
the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an
illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a
string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad
condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other
moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what
the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be chanelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But, in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely-from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on, so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies