Mike Rithgin

“There was so much he didn't want to engage with. All the emotions I was overflowing with, for example.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“There was also something panicked about my desire to acquire knowledge, in sudden terrible insights I saw that actually I didn’t know anything and it was urgent, I didn’t have a second to lose. It was almost impossible to adapt this urgency to the slowness that reading required.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 5

“In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

“They retained only the faintest recollection of what they had lost and had no desire to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They derided the mere possibility of this former felicity of theirs and termed it a day-dream. They could not even picture it to themselves in images and forms, but strange and wondrous to relate, having lost any credence in their former happiness, calling it a fairy tale, they so longed to be innocent and happy once more, all over again that, childlike, they fell down before this, their heart's desire, deified it, built temples, and began to worship their own idea, their own 'desire', and tearfully bowed before it in adoration, while at the same time utterly discounting its feasibility or the possibility of its realization. However, had it ever become possible for them to return to the state of happy innocence they had lost, and if someone could have shown it to them again and asked if they wanted to return to it, they would certainly have refused.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man