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“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.” ― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings (...) - Rebecca Solnit https://lithub.com/how-to-be-a-writer-10-tips-from-rebecca-solnit/

... Philosophy is, first and foremost, equipment for living, for making existential sense of this very real world we inhabit. - Thomas Chatterton Williams

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. - Steven Pressfield

“To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves." ― Oliver Sacks

Alive Together by Lisel Mueller Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you, when I might have been alive with anyone under the sun, when I might have been Abelard's woman or the whore of a Renaissance pope or a peasant wife with not enough food and not enough love, with my children dead of the plague. I might have slept in an alcove next to the man with the golden nose, who poked it into the business of stars, or sewn a starry flag for a general with wooden teeth. I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas or a woman without a name weeping in Master's bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule, my daughter, lost in a drunken bet. I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff. I like to think I might have been Mary Shelley in love with a wrong-headed angel, or Mary's friend. I might have been you. This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it, alive in a time when rationalists in square hats and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses agree it is almost over, alive with our lively children who-but for endless ifs- might have missed out on being alive together with marvels and follies and longings and lies and wishes and error and humor and mercy and journeys and voices and faces and colors and summers and mornings and knowledge and tears and chance.