Susan

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Goethe (I don’t know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: “Man must experience his own destiny” - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a “personal destiny;” there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category.”
― Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 1944-1948

“It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. —Agnes Repplier, The Treasure Chest”
― Karyl McBride, Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

“Przyznaję się przed sobą, że cierpienie jest naturalną częścią życia i będziemy go doświadczać, przynosi jakiś rodzaj ulgi i przyzwolenia na to, żeby było trudno, żeby było smutno, żeby pojawiły się łzy.”
― Marie Aubert, Grown Ups