Danika Hsieh

“The guard sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost, dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be dehumanized. To be cleaved from and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves but by their captures and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captures described the state of mind that his captivity created. "I was literally becoming a lesser human being." Few societies treasured dignity and feared humiliation as did the Japanese for whom a loss of honor could merit suicide.”
― Laura Hillenbrand

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“The night is alive with stars, and when I lie down and look up, I get lost up there. I feel like I’m falling, but upward, into the abyss of sky above me.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien