Malakhi

“I thought I'd die of it, but I didn't die. You can learn to eat violence. There is pleasure in not resisting. I dedicated myself to teaching my bully just how much a person can consume.”
― Sarah Manguso, Very Cold People

“And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Humility involves the full knowledge of our status as creatures, a clear consciousness of having received everything we have from God.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Humility: Wellspring of Virtue

“Mere parsimony is not economy. . . . Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part of true economy. —Letters to a Noble Lord, EDMUND BURKE, 1796”
― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating