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‘Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.’
The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.
You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.’
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’
She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.
She had a fire inside her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. Then she realised. A fire had no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.
there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.’
Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.