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 He’d heard about former employees in the Palace of Dreams who had in a manner of speaking withdrawn from life while they were still alive, and who, whenever they found themselves among people they used to know, looked as if they had just come down from the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

He could see that all his reflections, forethought and his easy mental reconciliation were not worth much and did not help at the moment when the blow fell. For, it is one thing to project your fears in your imagination, to foresee the worst, to work out your attitude and your defense; and at the same time to feel the satisfaction that all is still in order and in its place. It is quite another to find yourself facing an actual breakdown which demands urgent decisions and concrete actions.

...it was difficult not to think, not to remember, not to see. He had spent twenty-five years looking for "the middle way" which would bring peace of mind and give a person the dignity he could not live without. For twenty-five year he had been moving from one "elation" to another, seeking and finding, losing and gaining, and now he had arrived, exhausted, inwardly rent, worn out, back at the point from which he had set out....This meant that all the paths were only apparently going forward, but were in fact leading in a circle, like the deceptive labyrinths of oriental tales, and so they had brought him, tired and faint-hearted, to this place, among the torn papers and jumbled copies, to the point where the circle began again, as from every other point. This meant there could be no middle path, that true path leading forward, into stability, peace and dignity, but that we weretravelinglling in a circle, always along the same, deceptive path, and only the people and the generations change as they travel, constantly deceived....One just travels. And the road has meaning and dignity only in so far as we are able to find those qualities in ourselves. There is no path or purpose. One just travels. Travels and exhausts oneself.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

The destiny of all these foreigners, cast up and crammed into this narrow, damp valley and condemned to live in unusual conditions for an unknown length of time, now came to an abrupt maturity. The strange circumstances into which they had been thrown speeded up inner processes already at work in them, driving each of them with more relentless force in the direction of his impulses. The way these impulses developed and were manifested here was different in both degree and form than might have been the case in any other circumstances.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

Both the ill-will and the goodness of a people are the product of the circumstances in which they live and develop….I become more and more convinced of how wrong we are…to seek to introduce everywhere our own attitudes, our exclusively rational way of life and government. It seems to me more and more a senseless waste of effort. For it’s pointless to want to remove all abuses and preconceptions if you haven’t the strength or ability to remove what caused them.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

During the day…he was a calm, decisive man, with a definite name, profession and rank, a clear aim and set tasks which were the reason for his coming to this remote Turkish province.…But at night, he was both all that he was now and all that he had ever been or should have been. And that man, lying in the darkness of the long February nights, seemed to…himself a stranger, complex, and at times quite unknown.

Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls