Susan

“There's something to walking with autumnal thoughts through the evening fog. One likes to compose poems at a time like that.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“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

“Ich hatte den Tod ohnehin noch nicht verdient, ich konnte ihn doch gar nicht bezahlen, denn er kostete das Leben, und davon hatte ich noch viel zu wenig.”
― Benedict Wells, Spinner

“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