Sad Recluse

“They may find the world a terrifying and hostile place that can only be survived with constant, very great effort. It is typical of a neglected person that, whatever is not right in their life, there is often no narrative to account for its origin, in the way that a person who has suffered abuse (or a marked loss or a similar event) will have a narrative of, “This happened and it affected me in a certain way, and that’s the reason that I am as I am now.” A person who has been neglected may not have such a narrative but instead may be left to feel that they are just odd. They may in the past have been blamed for being odd and not responding “like a normal person.” Usually they feel dreadfully ashamed of how they are.”
― Kathrin A. Stauffer, Emotional Neglect and the Adult in Therapy: Lifelong Consequences to a Lack of Early Attunement

“I have crippling depression.”
― iDubbbz

“My pessimism and cynicism knows no bounds, nothing truly surprises me these days. But when that little spark of optimism, of hope is alight, it burns really brightly in the darkness.”
― George Banister

“If man is not ready to abdicate or to reconsider his case, it is because he has not yet drawn the final consequences of knowledge and of power. Convinced that his moment will come, that he will catch up with God and pass Him by, he clings—envious as he is—to the notion of evolution, as if the fact of advancing must necessarily bring him to the highest degree of perfection. Having sought to be other, he will end by being nothing; he is already nothing. Doubtless he is evolving, but against himself, to his cost, and toward a complexity which is ruining him. Becoming, progress: notions apparently tangential, actually divergent. True, everything changes, but rarely, if ever, for the better. Euphoric inflection of the original disease, of that false innocence which awakened in Adam a desire for the new, our faith in evolution, in the identity of becoming and progress, will collapse only when man, having reached the extremity of his distraction, having turned at last to the knowledge which leads to deliverance and not to power, will be in a position to offer an irrevocable no to his exploits and to his work. If he continues to clutch at them, he will doubtless enter upon the career of a ludicrous god or an obsolete animal, a solution as convenient as it is degrading, the ultimate stage of his infidelity to himself. Whatever choice he makes, and though he has not exhausted all the virtues of his failure, he has nonetheless fallen so low that it is hard to understand why he does not pray unceasingly, until his very voice and reason are extinguished.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Fall into Time