Diana

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may
stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of
your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have
always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief”
― Kahlil Gibrán

“You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five