Shane

“The man who hopes for the future delays its arrival, and the man who dreads it summons it to his door.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Howling Dark

“Don’t you think I understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being. Conscious at every moment. Vigilant. At the same time, the chasm between what you are to others and to yourself. The feeling of vertigo and the constant desire to at last be exposed — to be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated. Every tone of voice is a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? Oh, no. That’s ugly. You don’t do that. But you can be immobile. You can fall silent. Then, at least, you don’t lie. You can close yourself in, shut yourself off. Then you don’t have to play roles, show any faces, or make false gestures. You think…but you see, reality is bloody-minded. Your hideout isn’t watertight. Life seeps in everything. You’re forced to react. No one asks if it’s real or unreal, if you’re true or false. It’s only in the theater the question carries weight — hardly even, there. I understand you, Elisabet. I understand your keeping silent, your immobility. That you’ve placed this lack of will into a fantastic system... I understand and I admire you. I think you should maintain this role until it’s played out, until it’s not longer interesting. Then you can leave it, just as you bit-by-bit leave all your roles.”
― Ingmar Bergman, Persona

“For, if He doesn’t exist, man is master of the world, of all creation. Splendid! Only how is he going to be virtuous without God? That’s the question! I keep coming back to it. Who is he going to love then—man, I mean? To whom is he going to offer his gratitude, to whom is he going to sing his hymn of praise? Rakitin is ridiculous. Rakitin says you don’t need God to love mankind. Only a snotty pipsqueak could assert such a thing, it’s beyond me how he can say that. It’s all right for Rakitin. “You”, he said to me today, “should be fighting for the extension of man’s civic rights, or at least for the price of meat not to go up; that’s the simplest and most direct way of manifesting your love for mankind, rather than by philosophizing.” I came straight back at him: “Without God,” I said, “you’d be the first to raise the price of meat if the opportunity presented itself and there was a rouble or two to be made.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Karamazov Brothers