Danna Peña

“There can be no absurd outside the human mind.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “It’s been an honor to serve my country.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“It may be thought that suicide follows revolt - but wrongly. For it does not represent the logical outcome of the revolt. It is just the contrary by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future - he sees and rushes towards it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned man's last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees few yards away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide, in fact, is a man condemned to death.”
― Albert Camus