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

A person’s acts in life are like meals, and his thoughts and feelings like seasoning. Whoever puts salt on cherries or pours vinegar on sweets will fare poorly….

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

One of the sure paths to the real future (because there is also a false future) is to proceed in the direction of your fear.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

He who reaches the end of a road needs it no longer, and the road is not given to him any more.

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars

It is only an illusion that our thoughts are in our heads....Our heads and we as a whole are in our thoughts. We and our thoughts are like the sea and the stream that runs through it—our body is the current in the sea, but our thoughts are the sea itself. Hence the body makes room for itself in the world by forging through thoughts. And the soul is the seabed of one and the other....

Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars