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1 " We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise. "
― Jesse Ball , A Cure for Suicide
2 " You aren’t the thing that needs to change. It’s that you are overcome by your situation, by the way the world has descended on you. There is much in you that is young and new – and not just in you. In any person, even the oldest conceivable person. That’s what it means to be living – to engage with the cacophony of objects. "
3 " The world isn’t the place we are told to live in. It is another place entirely. We have both more choice, and less, than we are supposed to have. "
4 " – Some people forget, do you know – they forget what it is like to be young, to feel things ruthlessly, terribly. If you forget that much of life, well, I don’t know. "
5 " As I sat in the office of the cure, he began to speak and explain to me what it was. I was there, and I had no choice but to continue, it seemed there was nothing but that, nothing else – and yet, it was being explained to me, almost without my permission, as a matter of course, this thing I did not understand: the cure for suicide. "
6 " Never fall into the mistake of believing, said the examiner, that things are everywhere the way they are here, wherever here is, wherever everywhere is. "
7 " It is an enduring satisfaction for our species to make little systems and tend to them. "
8 " Much of the speech we do is largely meaningless and is just meant to communicate and validate small emotional contracts. "
9 " Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory. "
10 " It never occurred to him to wonder how there could be so many people, so many shifting groups that he only saw once in so small a village. Not matter how many such scenes played out, he didn't wonder -- for Henry had become a very particular sort of person. He had been groomed to be a person who did not ask questions. He had not been told to be that way, but all the same he had been led to it, and now that he was there, he felt a great comfort. "
11 " Sadness is a feeling of loss. There is something one wanted, and one doesn’t have it—or there is a way one wanted things to be, and things aren’t that way. That is sadness. Instead, you feel rootlessness. "
12 " It was as though the edges of things were where the greater part might be hidden - where he could find more. "
13 " She explained crying to him. He said that it felt very good. In his opinion, it was almost the same as laughing. She said that many people believe it is the same. "
14 " But dreams are imagined. They are a work of the imagination. "
15 " —But, if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it—nothing worthwhile. So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living—or to make unreasonable things reasonable. That is why a person should live. "
16 " She would allow her hair to be loose, and she then would appear to me out of the corner of my eye as some blinding Valkyrie, some effulgent flood of a thing, beauty without no boundaries, burning at the edges of itself. "
17 " We are the wreck of what we have been, and the place of our own future demise, "
18 " Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind. "
19 " But, if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it--nothing worthwhile. So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living--or to make unreasonable things reasonable. That is why a person should live. "
20 " —This, she said, is a book. It is one of our ways of codifying and keeping human knowledge. When it cannot be kept in a person’s head, this is one method of keeping it safe. It is a good way of moving ideas from one head to another, as it only requires one person’s time to do it, and not two. "
