Sijin

“Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write”
― Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“That moment - to this ...
may be years in the way they measure,
but it's only one sentence back in my mind -
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

“The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety