Petrichor

“Each person must develop a wholesome personal response to enduring the hardships of daily life and witnessing the discord, disharmony, dissension, and suffering of the world. We can either become an emotional hypochondriac or accept the fact that we are insignificant in a desolate and meaningless world. How we respond to the vale of tears until we shuffle off this mortal coil imbrues poetic meaning to our life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The confusion, that one so young - me it seems, because I remember - should be so damaged, that no one looked out for me or cared. And even now, I grin and mock myself out of fear. But I hold the truth aloft, a golden torch, sacred, because no one else dares to.”
― Billy Childish, My Fault

“I am humanely destroyed, I am the horseplayer who
became the
racetrack.”
― Charles Bukowski, Essential Bukowski: Poetry: A Definitive Anthology of Raw and Profound American Poetry

“It's always useless to try to cut oneself off, even from other people's cruelty and stupidity. You can't say: "I don't know about it." One either fights or collaborates. There is nothing less excusable than war, and the appeal to national hatreds. But once war has come, it is both cowardly and useless to try to stand on one side under the pretext that one is not responsible. Ivory towers are down. Indulgence is forbidden—for oneself as well as for other people. It is both impossible and immoral to judge an event from outside. One keeps the right to hold this absurd misfortune in contempt only by remaining inside it. One individual's reaction has no intrinsic importance. It can be of some use, but I can justify nothing. Dilettante's dream of being free to hover above his time is the most ridiculous form of liberty. This is why I must try to serve. And, if they don't want me, I must also accept the position of the "despised civilian." In both cases, I am absolutely free to judge things and to feel as disgusted with them as I like. In both cases, I am in the midst of the war and have the right to judge it. To judge it and to act”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942