Damien

“Beauty is indeed a choice. Day by day, moment by moment, we choose love or hate, life or death, light or darkness. The seeds for both are contained within all things, both living and nonliving. It all depends on what we focus on. We create our own world. Focus on beauty and beauty you find. Focus on darkness and darkness will prevail. Beauty guides through the heart. Darkness through the mind.”
― Scott Stillman, Wilderness, The Gateway To The Soul: Spiritual Enlightenment Through Wilderness

“One hard truth I stumbled upon is this: I drank because I wanted to drink. Every single drink, every single drug I took, I took because I made the decision to get fucked up, and fuck the consequences. I was sad and angry and lonely and a little alcohol made me feel better. It took me a long time to figure out that a lot of alcohol made me feel worse. Whoops.”
― Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run

“I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks. In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.” At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.)”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“we fear death to varying degrees, but the fear of not having lived is even stronger. That fear increases towards the end of life, when you understand that it will soon be too late.”
― Erling Kagge, Silence: In the Age of Noise