Anders Al-Fayoumi

“But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road- there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I am very concerned
when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of
touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with
memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not,
dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch
with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and
affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this
incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside
of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours.
You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on
his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected
of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just
convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your
existence”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation