Jawy

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“One wants to ask what the hell his parents made him for--which, is you will recall, the central question of Frankenstein's monster. What the hell did you make me for, and why did you make me like this? To a failed experiment, the failure is unforgivable.”
― Sofia Samatar, Made to Order: Robots and Revolution

“It is the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil