.

“Be reborn in courage, in intellect, in happiness, and in all else. Dare to renew your brilliance, dawning many times, like the sun, only changing your surroundings.”

“It is important to refuse to be intimidated. That refusal must not be based simply on a calculation of the odds of succeeding. The refusal to be intimidated must come, in the end, not from a sureness of succeeding but from a knowledge of the cost of scurrying for shelter through fake retractions and disowned truths. It is a question, in the end of self-respect.”

Existence is crushingly hard. It’s very tempting to step off its road, to avoid living one’s life. One has to work hard to make sure to go through existence, not around it. It’s a terrifying reality that you can end up, almost as if by accident, not having lived your given life. At its harshest, and most literally brutal, it can be taken from you by the appalling carceral state, by systemic racism, by the endless crimes of inequality—by the theft of opportunity. But it can also be taken from you minute by minute by the shortcuts that everything you encounter invites you to take—to keep up, to do more within less time, to trade in wisdom, or even knowledge, for information. Our ever-shortening attention span craving its quick satisfactions—which affects whatever creative act might even be attempted, curtailing it before it even finds deep water—is the most powerful tool of the surveillance capitalist state, or whatever you want to call this enmeshment of powerful interests using our desire for instant access to enrich itself.

“Hung on my bedroom wall is the quote attributed to Joan of Arc: “I am not afraid. I was born to do this.” However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life unspools itself, I was created to bear it.”

“You have to be tougher. You have to learn the way to beat your path through, to make yourself felt, and make yourself necessary.”