We are not aware when new beginnings arrive; we only discover them later when they have already engulfed us, when everything merely continues. Then we believe that everything could have been different, but it could not have.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Everything changes when a man loses his bearings.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

I think it was at this period that my own talk began to upset me. The words I uttered seemed like false smiles I was displaying at a party I’d gone to against my will. Sometimes I would overhear myself in the act of speech, like a man who suddenly sees himself in a mirror. Then I grew afraid….I began to wonder whether anything I had ever said was what I had wanted to say. I began to wonder whether anything I had ever written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, trying to push its way through….Sometimes I imagine that if we were very still we could hear, rising from the forests and oceans, the quiet laughter of animals, as they listen to us talk….I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Steven Millhauser, History of A Disturbance in the New Yorker of March 5, 2007

I mentioned to him a friend of mine who was formerly gloomy from low spirits, and much distressed by the fear of death, but was now uniformly placid, and contemplated his dissolution without any perturbation. "Sir, (said Johnson,) this is only a disordered imagination taking a different turn."

James Boswell in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

I began my fickle refutation…with pleasure, realizing maybe for the first time that the heavens and the secrets of the universe, that the secrets of death and existence were the most convenient region into which one could escape from the cares of this world. If they did not exist, one would need to invent them as a refuge.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Nothing would improve if things were different in our lives.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

(Or as Buckeroo Banzai once put it, no matter where you go, there you are.)

I would often say:

Death is a change of state. The soul begins to live by itself. Until it parted from the body, it held with hands, saw with eyes, heard with ears, but it knew the heart of the matter on its own.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

The river resembles me: sometimes turbulent and foaming, more often calm and inaudible. I was sorry when they dammed it up below the tekke and diverted it into a trench to make it obedient and useful, so it would run through a trough and drive a mill wheel. And I was happy when it swelled, destroyed the dam, and flowed free. I knew all the while that only tamed waters can mill wheat.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly--a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud.... What had he done with his life--other than seek a transient peace between the legs of women. He had, in order to live another day, and then another, served the people who now did what they did and who would, he knew for a certainty, do what they would do.

Alan Furst, Dark Star

There are doors that let you in
And out
But never open.

Radionhead, "Pull / Pulk Revolving Doors," Amnesiac

To have defended ourselves when we didn’t need to is one of the first things for which we need to forgive ourselves--as well as others.

Mutual Injury and Mutual Acknowledgement (Lecture in Honor of Andrew Samuels, World in Transition Conference, London, October 2006), Jessica Benjamin.

Instincts are misleading
You shouldn't think what you're feeling
They don't tell you what you know you should want.

Death Cab for Cutie, "Lightness", Transatlanticism

I never knew a man who was so generally acceptable. He made every body quite easy, overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said. Every body liked him; but he had no friend, as I understand the word, nobody with whom he exchanged intimate thoughts.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

All grief for what cannot in the course of nature be helped, soon wears away; in some sooner, indeed, in some later; but it never continues very long, unless where there is madness.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

Some change in the form of life, gives from time to time a new epocha of existence. In a new place there is something new to be done, and a different system of thoughts rises in the mind.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in his The Life of Samuel Johnson

When you live near a mini-golf course,you know you are too far into suburbia.

Galluchman

He’d never have believed he could become detached so quickly from the ordinary world—after only a few months’ absence. He’d heard about former employees in the Palace of Dreams who had in a manner of speaking withdrawn from life while they were still alive, and who, whenever they found themselves among people they used to know, looked as if they had just come down from the moon.

Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams

For there is no man’s reality around us that someone else is not dreaming about somewhere in this human ocean tonight, nor is there somebody’s dream that is not becoming the reality of another.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

You are like the girl who always rose late; when she married in the next village and for the first time had to rise early, she saw the hoarfrost on the fields and said to her mother-in-law, "We don’t have that in our village!" Like her, you think there is no love in the world, because you have never been awake early enough to encounter it, although every morning it is there on time....

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

And then I realized there was no more shutting of your eyes to the truth, no salvation in being blindfolded, no dream and reality, no being awake or asleep. Everything is one and the same continuing eternal day and world, coiling around you like a snake. That is when I saw vast, remote happiness as being small but close; when I perceived the great cause as empty, and the small as my love….

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars