Quote of the day #9

"I never used to fight over stupid things.
She stopped in the middle of the icy garden. It was precisely because she had found everything so stupid that she had ended up accepting what life had naturally imposed on her. In adolescence she thought it was too early to choose; now in young adulthood, she was convinced it was too late to change."


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"What makes a person hate themselves?"
"Cowardice, perhaps. Or the eternal fear of being wrong, of not doing what others expect."


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"I must get a grip on myself. I'm the kind of person who sticks to any decision she makes, who always sees things through.
It's true that in her life she had seen many things through to their ultimate consequences, but only unimportant things [...] She was intransigent about the easy things, as if trying to prove to herself how strong and indifferent she was was, when in fact she was just a fragile woman [...]
She had overcome her minor defects only to be defeated by matters of fundamental importance. She had managed to appear utterly independent when she was, in fact, desperately in need of company [...]
Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything [...]
She might have impresses a lot of people with her strength and determination, but where had it left her? In the void. Utterly alone."


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"What was God? What was salvation if, that is, the world needed saving? Nothing. If everyone [...] just lived their lives and let others do the same, God would be in every moment, in every grain of mustard, in the fragment of cloud that is there one moment and gone the next. God was there, and yet people believed they still had to go on looking, because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith."


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"If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation."


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"Is wanting to be different a serious illness?"
"It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. [...] It's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. [...] People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different..."


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"... the danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort."


~Paulo Coelho 'Veronika Decides to Die'