Charissa

“One of the challenges with pain - physical or psychic - is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can't be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language (...) English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache... The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“The ultimate purpose of Zen," I remembered the röshi telling me, "is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“It isn't only that he died, or how died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“There was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life