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“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“One question keeps troubling me: Why?. . . The short answer: I don't know. and yet that single word, why, remains the consummate human query. By nature, we're curious. We want to know. ”
― Don Piper

“Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all my best skills, intentions, and good ideas.”
― Anne Lamott

“Ah, Sofia, darlin'! On my best days, I believe in Him with all my heart."

"And on your worst days?" she had asked that night.

"Even if it's only poetry, it's poetry to live by, Sofia--poetry to die for. . .”
― Mary Doria Russell