"You didn't have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn't exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been."
"The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one."
🇵🇸 dont forget to keep talking about the genocide and violence by "israel" that is still happening in Gaza and Palestine just as much as you are talking about the protests and divestment camps on american university campuses 🇵🇸
"The charm of elegant manners, of simplicity, and of apparent frankness was almost magical. It could never have entered his head that all this simple frankness and nobility, wit, and refined personal dignity was perhaps only an exquisite artistic veneer. The majority of the guests, in spite of their prepossessing exterior, were rather empty-headed people, who were themselves unaware, however, that much of their superiority was mere veneer, for which they were not responsible indeed, as they had adopted it unconsciously and by inheritance."
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Learning to set boundaries comes with so much anxiety. Anxiety over confrontation, the other persons reaction, potentially losing that other person. And yet it is so necessary for healing. Make some space for that anxiety and allow it to exist, but continue setting your boundaries in the face of it.
"Nothing is easier for 'ordinary' people of limited intelligence than to imagine themselves exceptional and original and to revel in that delusion without the slightest misgiving."
"Everything has its path, and everything knows its path, and with a song goes forth, and with a song returns. Only he knows nothing, and understands nothing, neither men nor sounds; he is outside it all, and an outcast."
"But the friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is the devourer of humanity, to say nothing of his conceit; for, wound the vanity of any one of these numerous friends of humanity, and he's ready to set fire to the world out of petty revenge.."