141
" It is generally supposed, and not least by Catholics, that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in his finished work, but when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated. What the fiction writer will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of an abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them. "
― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
146
" Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem’s (Paul’s was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this–love; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. "
― Virginia Woolf , To the Lighthouse
153
" These times are hard, but I won't walk away jaded, darker, different. I feel. I cry to heal. If you saw me in those moments, maybe you'd think I was a mess. But I don't call it a mess. I call it strength.
Real strength isn't about building walls. Real strength is about staying open, no matter what. It's about taking life—with all the pleasures that fade and all the pain that sticks around for too long—and not shutting down, not closing down, not building up those walls.
Resilience isn't hard, impenetrable, iron. Resilience is flexible, soft, warm.
Stay strong. The real kind of strong. Don't let your automatic mind reflexes make you jump away from pain and towards pleasure. Make choices. See clearly. And never, ever, stop feeling.
Don't go numb. The world, even with all its horror, is too beautiful to miss. "
― Vironika Tugaleva
155
" With a cluther of limbs and organs, all that is needed to live again, to hold out a little time, I'll call that living, I'll say it's me, I'll get standing, I'll stop thinking, I'll be too busy, getting standing, staying standing, stirring about, holding out, getting to tomorrow, tomorrow week, that will be ample, a week will be ample, a week in spring, that puts the jizz in you. "
― Samuel Beckett , Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose 1950-1976