#pessl

May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth - your truth, not someone else's - and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory, and philosophy I have ever known.

Now why don't you tie that notion into a noose and see if it's strong enough to hang yourself?

...but like a Dresden church with Byzantine architecture on the eve of February 13, 1945, he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

He said you couldn't pretend the terrible things in life didn't happen. You can't clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It's how you learn. And try to make improvements.

"I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around."

Life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming.

Leontyne Bennet skillfully dissected in The Commonwealth of Lost Vanities (1969) Virgil's renowned quotation: "Love conquers all." "For centuries upon centuries," he writes on p. 559, "we have been misinterpreting this famed trio of words. The uninformed masses breathlessly hold up this dwarfish phrase as a justification for snogging in public squares, abandoning wives, cuckolding husbands, for the escalating divorce rate, for swarms of bastard children begging for handouts in the Whitechapel and Aldgate tube stations - when in fact, there is nothing remotely encouraging or cheerful about this oft-quoted phrase. The latin poet wrote 'Amor vincit omnia,' or 'Love conquers all.' He did not write, 'Love frees all' or 'liberates' all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely, this cannot be a positive thing. And then, he wrote 'conquers all,' - not exclusively the unpleasant things, destitution, assassination, burglary, but all, including pleasure, peace, common sense, liberty and self-determination. And thus we may appreciate that Virgil's words are not encouragement, but rather a caveat, a cue to evade, shirk, elude the feeling at all costs, else we risk the massacre of the things we hold most dear, including our sense of self."