Michal

“You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”
― Sam Harris, Free Will

“When you set sail for Ithaca,
wish for the road to be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.”
― C.P. Cavafy

“Walls

Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.

And now I sit here and consider and despair.

My brain is worn with meditating on my fate:
I had outside so many things to terminate.

Oh! why when they were building did I not beware!

But never a sound of building, never an echo came.
Out of the world, insensibly, they shut me out.”
― Constantinos P. Cavafis

“You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.”
― C.P. Cavafy