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"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."
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"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
Art

"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art."
Art

"I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art."
Art

"For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going."
Cause

"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."
Philosophy

"We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story."
Life

"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."
Desire

"Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se."
Society

"We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?"
Fact

"When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state."
Mental Health
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"It is invisible hands that torment and bend us the worst."
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Personal Development

"The struggle is never easy to finding what is lost and to gain the best of what is to come without sweat."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I realized that it was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it. And since then, whenever I have heard of someone threatening to commit suicide, it has had little or no effect on me."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways."
Author Name
Personal Development

"But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,--even this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone conneced her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so many, many traces when a very child."
Author Name
Personal Development

"In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics."
Author Name
Personal Development

"You," Seven pronounced, "are a train wreck of sexual history."But this is inaccurate. A runaway train is an accident. Me, I'll jump in front of the tracks. I'll even tie myself down in front of the speeding engine. There's some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Every goal has a road block, that is our fear of failure."
Author Name
Personal Development
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