Meggie

“Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“As I grow longer in the tooth, I find myself shaking off for greater and greater stretches of time, and I always use this time to fret morosely about my health in general, and about the likelihood that a grave illness, conceivably located in the bladder region, will overtake me in the future, maybe imminently. In this way a pleasurable, natural act becomes the catalyst for somber reflections and an unnatural, incipient depression. So much of life follows this pattern exactly, I think, We begin to lose ourselves in a joyful or gratifying act - it can be a creature comfort or something complicatedly emotional like stimulating conversation or the solitary immersion in a poem, a beautiful landscape, or a work of art - and we forget, in the moment of serenity, all the pain and trouble of life. Until, quite suddenly, and as a rule, shockingly, this very forgetfulness, our fleeting holiday from care, becomes nothing more than another occasion to remember how truly infrequently happiness comes to us, and how likely we are to die in some hortible way. Then, disgusted with ourselves over our inability to enjoy life, we halt the pleasurable activity and move on, as speedily as we can, to other business.”
― Donald Antrim, The Hundred Brothers

“I don’t want my heart to be broken,” they say. Or, “I don’t want to fail.” “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

“This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow