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"We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment."
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"Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief."

"Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands."

"Suffering is an essential component of life. No person escapes suffering, which is indivisible from life itself. Suffering is what places in in contact with the self; it is what allows us to understand the spiritual nature behind our existence."

"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."

"He panted over me, winded by his own absurd lecture. The stench of his alcoholic breath stung my nose. Again I didn't answer. I hoped he'd tire out and end his speech and hobble back to the living room without touching me. Such hopes were unlikely, as was the case this time. "Answer me, you good-for-nuthin' wench! The pain bit instantly as his hand connected with my cheek. I shook my head in answer to his crazy questions, feeling a rise of warm tears."

"This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain..."
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"It's not a question of God `sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud."

"The Divine "goodness" differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning."

"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."

"Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you...God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."

"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all."

"Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure."

"It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next."
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