Driftless Doomer

“I don't rule out suicide as being unthinkable for people who have tried to live full lives; and don't regard it as negating the wish and faith and satisfaction and fun and even ecstasy they may have known before. In killing himself a person acknowledges his failures during a time span when perhaps heaven and earth had caught him like a pair of scissors--but doesn't repudiate his life span. Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.”
― Edward Hoagland, Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life

“I also realize... that all our lives we love illusion, neatly caught between confusion and the need to know we are alive.”
― The Residents

“What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness that you may one day come to suspect the truth of that moment at all. The calling that seemed so clear will be lost in echoes of questionings and indecision; the church that seemed to save you will fester with egos, complacencies, banalities; the deepest love of your life will work itself like a thorn in your heart until all you can think of is plucking it out. Wisdom is accepting the truth of this. Courage is persisting with life in spite of it. And faith is finding yourself, in the deepest part of your soul, in the very heart of who you are, moved to praise it.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atomic bomb.”
― Theodor W. Adorno