Alison Brady

“The value of a human being, Nietzsche said, does not lie in his usefulness: for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom he could be useful.”
― Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

“perhaps it will help if we all realize that perhaps all of us have been pests at one time or another to somebody but we never knew it. shit, it's a horrible thought but most probably true and maybe it will help us bear up under the pest. basically, there is no 100 percent man. we are all run through with various madnesses and ugliness that we ourselves are not aware of but that everyone else is aware of.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigiliance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“It is small white, oval, scored tablets.

It doesn't create or transform; it interprets. It renders fleeting what was definitive; it renders contingent what was ineluctable. It supplies a new interpretation of life - less rich, less artificial, and marked by a certain rigidity. It provides no form of happiness, or even real relief; it's action is of a different kind: by transforming life into a sequence of formalities it allows you to fool yourself. On this basis, it helps people to live, or at least to not die - for a certain period of time.”
― Houellebecq