Dave Mills

“At home my parents were always talking about ‘feelings’ and ‘people’, and when my friends came round they loved it, because my parents talked about ‘who they were’. I was like: ‘Why can’t we just be a normal family and talk neutrally about facts?’ I felt this wasn’t a life, to be constantly thinking about… consciousness.”
― Toby Jones

“And right then, I come the closest I think I ever will to understanding why Knight left. He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him. He was never happy in his youth -- not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. It made him feel constantly nervous. There was no place for him, and instead of suffering further, he escaped. It wasn't so much a protest as a quest; he was like a refugee from the human race. The forest offered him shelter (p 182)”
― Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

“If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been better to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“I didn’t want to read it, but it was my strict policy never to disagree with people. Bitter experience had taught me that the minute you contradict someone, you instantly get sucked into their asinine private world. By avoiding arguments I wound up not talking to anyone. I lived utterly alone in my own asinine private world. Terribly alone and constantly crowded by idiots—that was my life. Rats gnaw off their feet with less provocation.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika