Posts tagged "choice"

Emphasis Mine, 2

And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience … 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.

— Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

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Oath, Magnified

“How do I feel?”  …
If I feel bad, then is there anything
I can do to make myself feel better? …
I must fight to give myself the right to feel good
about myself and to feel good mood-wise,
regardless of any accomplishment
or nonaccomplishment whatsoever.

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a bird
courageously
flying into the city

Issa

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Starry-eyed

It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of flight, a change of identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world …

She was expanding the concept of trace out of all proportion. She wanted not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to eliminate the entire life that she had left behind.

— My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

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