lemur leaf frog

I’m going to tell you something: thoughts are never honest. Emotions are. Do not go around asking for honesty in what people think; much of what they perceive as thinking is empty anyway because it’s thought out again and again and comes out refined and muddy. The ones who know how to feel might have to say to you a couple of interesting things or not and when they do that, you ought to know how to listen. So learn how to listen. You can’t make someone open up about their feelings in case they don’t want to. But you can remain open yourself through listening deeply and completely; they might want to talk about the weather and keep it simple — allow them to feel the simplicity…Emotion pours out directly or indirectly each time people engage themselves in the process of genuine interaction.

Virginia Woolf walked into the sea. This is her suicide note to her husband: I have the feeling that I shall go mad and cannot go on any longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it and cannot fight any more. I owe all my happiness to you. You have been so perfectly good. I cannot go on and spoil your life. Amazing directness and simplicity from a writer who explored all the ambiguities of the English language, whose writing was so abstract and mysterious and labyrinthian. Simple, direct, as all true suffering. It was the first time she spoke as a human being.

Alice X. Zhang