Tamta

“She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.”
― Ray Bradbury, I Sing the Body Electric! & Other Stories

“And then, the stars came out. It was like that first night of childhood when his father had taken him out beyond the city to a hill where the lights could not diminish the Universe. And there were a thousand, no ten thousand, no ten million billion stars filling the darkness. The stars were manifold and bright, and they did not care. Even then he had known: they do not care. If I breathe or do not breathe, live or die, the eyes that look from all around don’t care. And he had seized his father’s hand and gripped tight, as if he might fall up into that abyss. Now, in this building, he was full of the old terror and the old sense of beauty and the old silent crying out after mankind. The stars filled him with pity for small men lost in so much size.”
― Ray Bradbury, I Sing the Body Electric! and Other Stories

“Unwilling to tolerate life’s ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way. Surely someone must know. It simply cannot be that life is just what it appears to be, that there are no hidden meanings, that this is it, just this and nothing more. It’s not fair, not enough! We cannot possibly bear having to live life as it is, without reassurance, without being special, without even being offered some comforting explanations. Come on now! Come across! You’ve got to give us something to make it all right. The medicine tastes lousy. Why should we have to swallow it just because it’s the only thing we can do? Can’t you at least promise us that we will have to take it just once, that it won’t taste that bad, that we will feel just fine immediately afterward, that we will be glad we took it? No? Well then, surely, at least you have to give us a lollipop for being good. But what if we are talking to ourselves? What if there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?”
― Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients

“But after a while, she began to experience the new reality of each person as being as strong and as weak as anyone else. Slowly, she learned that each of us grown-ups has as much and as little power as the other, and that we had best learn to take care of ourselves.(83)”
― Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients