B. > B.'s Quotes

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”
― Robert Walser, Selected Stories

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“How good I would feel if I could be something that called itself neither man nor woman.”
― Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts

“What terrible shame overcomes me when I discover the male or female in myself!”
― Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts

“I’m looking for a person who understands my language and speaks it. A person who, without being a pariah, will question not only the rights and the values of the marginalized, but also those of the people who claim to be normal.”
― Xavier Dolan

“The problem is going to be, "Let's see, I spent all day staring at a computer screen and then at night my most meaningful relationships are with the two-dimensional characters who aren't in fact two-dimensional characters . . . Gee, I wonder why I'm lonely and doing a lot of drugs? Could there be any connection between the fact that I've got nothing to do with other people, that I don't really have a fucking clue what it is to have a real life, and the fact that most of my existence is mediated by entertainment that I passively choose to receive?”
― David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations