zai

“And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words. Yours, Rainer”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet

“The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Is the wandering and sinful, but now rest-seeking and repentant, man justified in daring the world’s opinion, in order to attach to him for ever this gentle, gracious, genial stranger, thereby securing his own peace of mind and regeneration of life?” “Sir,” I answered, “a wanderer’s repose or a sinner’s reformation should never depend on a fellow-creature.  Men and women die; philosophers falter in wisdom, and Christians in goodness: if any one you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend and solace to heal.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I just sit. Or I walk and walk.
Or I stand somewhere looking at one spot.
And it seems to me as I stand here that I am totally disconnected from the rest of the world around me. Nothing, absolutely nothing connects me with it.
The world around me goes on being busy, conducts its wars, enslaves countries, kills people, tortures. The real world...
My life till now seems to have slipped through this real world without participating in it, without caring about it, without any connection to it. Even when I was in the very middle of it, I wasn't really there.
My only life connection is in these scribbles.
Here I stand, this moment, now, with my arms hanging down, the shoulders fallen, eyes on the floor, beginning my life from point zero.
I don't want to connect myself to this world.
I am searching for another world to which it would be worth connecting myself.”
― Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go