A Recent Martyr Quotes

“Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“That's my problem. I'm constantly wary. I can't trust anyone.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“I've caused you pain, and I'm sorry for it,' she said. 'But perhaps that pain will keep you from forgetting me.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“And it seemed to me that longing was everything, longing is all we are.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“The natural beauty of the earth made hard for me to consider the pathetic struggle of humans on the face of it. The great release of death, I thought, was not from the bondage to our lovely planet- who could ever wish to leave this extraordinary place?- but from one another.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“The air was still. It was that hour before evening when the sun sheds great horizontal beams just above the horizon and the air itself reveals levels of dust and insect life previously unthought of.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“...because it requires the total surrender of my will and finally, ultimately, the wholesale destruction of my ego. That is hard. It I'm going to another world, I cry out, I want to be ME in it.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“...most people never experience such a passion, that I had been incredibly, divinely fortunate to have found, in a world where most souls dig there own graves with the sharp edge of their bitter loneliness...”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“To fear an inner life, she thought, was the greatest foolishness. It was like fearing a breath of air. Why did people find it harder to admit to a universe within than without? Why trust, for a moment, one's own absurd measurement of either?”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“What was the good at having an ideal if everyone is trying to beat everyone else at admitting how impossible it is to achieve it.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr

“We long for a life we never had but of which we seem to have a clear memory; a life in wich there is no longing.”
― Valerie Martin, A Recent Martyr