UnRepentant on Tumblr

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Friends and liars don't wait for me

It has always seemed strange to me... The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

"I thought about it and my dream was broken

Regret comes in four tones that operate in unison to shape our lives. First, we regret the life that we lived, the decisions we made, the words we said in anger, and enduring the shame wrought from experiencing painful failures in work and love. Secondly, we regret the life we did not live, the opportunities missed, the adventures postponed indefinitely, and the failure to become someone else other than whom we now are. American author Shannon L. Alder said, ‘One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.’ Third, we regret that parts of our life are over; we hang onto nostalgic feelings for the past. When we were young and happy, everything was new, and we had not yet encountered hardship. As we age and encounter painful setbacks, we experience disillusionment and can no longer envision a joyous future. Fourth, we experience bitterness because the world did not prove to be what we hoped or expected it would be.

You think when you reach a certain age things will start making sense, and you find out that you are just as lost as you were before. I suppose that's what damnation is.

Perhaps beauty can be measured by the distance it has travelled to come into being. That bad people make good art is a cause for hope. To be human is to transgress, of that we can be sure, yet we all have the opportunity for redemption, to rise above the more lamentable parts of our nature, to do good in spite of ourselves, to make beauty from the unbeautiful, and to have the courage to present our better selves to the world. Hope ... resides in a gesture of kindness from one broken individual to another or, indeed, we can find it in a work of art that comes from the hand of a wrongdoer. These expressions of transcendence, of betterment, remind us that there is good in most things, rarely only evil. Once we awaken to this fact, we begin to see goodness everywhere, and this can go some way in setting right the current narrative that humans are shit and the world is fucked.

All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.

I am distressed, almost discouraged, and fatigued to the point of feeling slightly ill. What I am doing is no good, and in spite of your confidence, I am very much afraid that my efforts will all lead to nothing.

The Smoking Nun

Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going? Let me be as urgent as a knife, then...

To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.

And in the lowest deep, a lower deep

A big problem since Watergate is that elites don’t face accountability. It creates a culture of impunity that encourages the shamelessness of someone like Trump.

Rejection does not mean you aren't good enough. It just means the other person failed to realize what you have to offer.

"On certain days, driving into Santa Monica was like having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica."