Russ Johnson

“I condole with you, sir, indeed I do. Low spirits, Mr Black, are the very worst torment that a man can be afflicted with. Sometimes it seems to me that all of London resembles nothing so much as cold pease porridge, both in colour and consistency. I see people with cold-pease-porridge faces and cold-pease-porridge hands walking down cold-pease-porridge streets. Ah, me! How bad I feel then! The very sun up in the sky is cold and grey and porridge-y, and has no power to warm me. Do you often feel chilled, sir?” John Longridge would lay his hand upon Stephen’s hand. “Ah, Mr Black, sir,” he would say, “you are cold as the tomb.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“But for the rest nothing amused him; nothing satisfied him. All was shadows, emptiness, echoes and dust.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“WHAT WE’RE WORKING with in basic meditation practice—and more explicitly in tonglen practice—is the middle ground between acting out and repressing. We learn to see our thoughts of hatred, lust, poverty, loathing, whatever they might be. We learn to identify the thoughts as “thinking,” let them go, and begin to contact the texture of energy that lies beneath them. We gradually begin to realize how profound it is just to let those thoughts go, not rejecting them, not repressing them. We discover how to hold our seat and feel completely what’s underneath the story line of craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about ourselves,”
― Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

“So if you are going to look for a pearl, it is best to still the waves; it will be hard to find if you stir the water. When the water of concentration is still and clear, the pearl of mind reveals itself.”
― Thomas Cleary, Minding Mind: A Course in Basic Meditation