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"In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience."
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"Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting... By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it."
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Personal Development
"If your existence does not make any difference, you are no more than a dead body."
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Personal Development
"We live in the shadows of perception. Our dull awareness gives us no useful clues as to why we are here."
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Personal Development
"Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure."
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Personal Development
"All life depends upon the opportunistic interplay between elemental forces, the mysterious dualities of the numinous universe. Ying and yang forces of the natural world (lightness and darkness, fire and water, expansion and contraction) create tangible dualities that are complementary, interconnected, and independent. Without the firmament in the midst of the waters, without both sunshine and water, no life forms could subsist on this rocky orb. Without the rich soil surrounded by a canopy of an illimitable sky how could we feed ourselves, how could we breathe?"
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Personal Development
"This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!"
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Personal Development
"I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me."
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Personal Development
"No one was created in vain."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Life is in time; seconds, minutes and hours."
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Personal Development
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"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."
Wisdom
"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."
Anxiety
"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
Parenting
"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."
Writing
"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
Poetry
"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
Satire
"What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd."
Anger
"To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man."
Humanity
"The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die."
Mortality
"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't-whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
Humor
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