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I didn’t see myself as a battered wife. I was a strong, smart, independent woman in love with a deeply troubled man. I told myself he needed these guns to feel safe, after all he’d suffered as an abused child. I thought I was the only person on earth who could help him stare down his childhood demons. I thought I could take it.
Saturday, May 28, 2022
Leslie Morgan Steiner
simple joys of swimming
My most beautiful friend, a grandmother in her late 70s, hates bathing suits so passionately that she only swims naked. Mostly late at night in private pools. Occasionally in a deserted lake. She says she’s too old to endure the torture devices designed to deprive older women of the simple joys of swimming, frolicking and enjoying our birthrights — the bodies that nature gave us.
Leslie Morgan Steiner, Article
Five Bucks
SAINT THERESA'S SATURDAY MORNING THRIFT STORE
5 pairs of jeans,
2 winter pill box hats,
1 cotton black vest
1 cotton terrycloth bathrobe reversible unisex
1 yellow and black striped cotton long sleeved shirt for Bill
1 colorful linen blouse for me
(ROMEO- pup was invited in to hang out and drink water)
April Michael
Going through bipolar cycles is like traveling to other dimensions, and I can’t expect people without bipolar to understand it.
Hemingway
I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
Ernest Hemingway
Mary Ruefle
I think there’s always a certain amount of invisibility when you write. You’re alone in a room, no one is looking over your shoulder. When I was young, writing was the one invisible space I had, and it made me very happy because I could become invisible while writing. I still feel this way, except there’s much less of a difference between my inner, creative life and my outer life than when I was young. And that’s a joyful thing!
Poems are my inner life, take it or leave it. I don’t particularly care what the reader thinks because I’m just not invested in other people’s responses to my inner life.
Mary Ruefle, Paris Review Interview
trying to please invisible ghosts
None of the five of us attended our own graduations knowing our parents wouldn't attend. I think about that every year as I see the graduation celebrations happening in the papers and at the restaurant on my street. The attention was not allowed to be taken off of the King and Queen. Not even for a split second!
The tragedy is that my siblings now in their 50's 60's 70's, are still running around like chickens with their heads chopped off trying to please invisible ghosts.
Everyone thinks of changing the world
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
―“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Anna Karenina“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
― Anna Karenina“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― The Kreutzer Sonata“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts.”
― Anna Karenina“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Anna Karenina“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Anna Karenina
― War and Peace
This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
― Crime and Punishment“I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
― The Brothers Karamazov“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.”
― The Idiot“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”
― Notes from Underground“If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.”
― The Insulted and Humiliated
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
― The Idiot
If he laughs well, he's a good man
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
―“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
―“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
―“Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.”
―“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
― The Brothers Karamazov“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
― The Brothers Karamazov“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”
―“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.”
―“Beauty will save the world”
― The Idiot“You can be sincere and still be stupid.”
―
Much unhappiness
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
―
The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Crime and Punishment“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Crime and Punishment“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― The Brothers Karamazov“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Notes from Underground“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.”
― Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― The Brothers Karamazov“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Crime and Punishment“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
―“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
― Crime and Punishment“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”
― Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
― The Brothers Karamazov“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― White Nights“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
― Crime and Punishment
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