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
I am I is the essence of self-acceptance. But it is not passive or selective self-acceptance. It is active, loud, strong, and, if necessary, heroically aggressive. It applies to all aspects of self …
Judgment value, moral equivocation, cultural and conventional values, the ideas of others do not cause me to deaden, repress or attempt to cut off parts of myself. I includes all that the culture may see as assets, liabilities, limitations, resources, insensitivities, cruelties, neurotic, good, bad, sensitive, wise or stupid in me.
— Compassion and Self Hate, Theodore Isaac Rubin
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
In a state of grace with myself, I do not abandon myself when the going is tough or should others find me antithetical in any way in their frames of reference. Loyalty means care and kindness at all times, and particularly when they are needed to reduce the pain of difficult times. I never, absolutely never, side with anyone who is against my welfare, I aid nobody who detracts from my dignity, who makes me feel less than human either through subhuman onslaughts or superhuman demands. I fight or avoid people whose effect is ultimately destructive to my validity as a person, or who in any way dilute my ability to take myself seriously.
— Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Issac Rubin
