†

“If I think I am only going to have a good life, if I get more, that is immediately an engine for hurry, and therefore anxiety because I don’t have enough. Peace and contentment really go together.”

“The world’s weapons are not powerful, because they can never bring peace and justice. They only escalate chaos, violence and death. The bigger our missiles the more powerless they prove themselves to be in restoring justice to the world.”

“If there is no God then men and women cannot be made in His image and are not therefore required to act in accordance with that image.”

“We wildly underestimate how much grief we carry”

“Others, by their ability to satisfy our desires so effortlessly, become addictive, blinding us to the real thing.”

“Love looks like us, and that can be a little daunting.

“If you want to have loving feelings, do loving things.”

“When faced with the absence of the most important people in our lives, our brains respond by trying to solve a problem… This is where the pain of grief comes from: there is a problem that cannot be solved.”

“Right now, you are becoming your future.”

“I think we all have so much longing in us to live. We have an image of what our life wants to look like, feel like, tastes, sense. And I think it’s so hard to have the courage to follow those longings, to own those longings, to want what we want. Because then what if we don’t fucking get it? And then the heartbreak comes. And the deepest longings are the ones that we are really afraid to mention, the ones that really could cost us.”

“we don’t get to be in charge of what we lose, how we lose it, and when.”

“I think that is the killer, that impulse that is not mine, that is inherited, that is conditioned from our culture, to not feel to calcify the heart, to not reveal the heart, to not trust another person with our hearts is what gets us into trouble.”

“But the sadness is longing. It’s true longing and there’s no shame in it.”

“You are already philosophical, you only need to have been born. You are already artful, you already put things together creatively to produce new things. You are both of these things, even if you have never made a profession of either of them. Even if you didn’t already realise you are.”

“I could almost speak, the love I almost felt.”

“Tragedy doesn’t ruin anybody, hopelessness does.”

“Not for keeps, to be sure, but as least for the time being, the world has given them back again, and whatever the world chooses to do later on, it can never so much as lay a hand on the having-beenness of this time.”