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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead
“The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Gabriola Nims: Yes, child. An authentic death would return us to the norm, to the overwhelming citizenship of indifferent, non-conscious agencies in the universe. But life comes armed with its own inner chains of seduction for binding us to it.

Those pleading emotions, those reasons, those loyalties, those responsibilities, obligations, dependencies, routines, habits, goals, promises, oaths. The posturings ranging from narcissistic to self-pitying to self-loathing, the fears, the guilt, the loves, the memories, the desires and interests artfully whispering in the mind's ear about how wonderful they are and how horribly dreadful the opposite is. As if they would still be around to vengefully torment us in oblivion, as restless needs with nothing to act upon. Death, that champion of liberators, unremittingly obliterates them all.

Which is why it's probably just too ideal to be true, child. Death, I mean -- genuine death. Just another one of runaway optimism's bedfellows. If the inferior Heaven is too absurd to be real, then how much more so the Kingdom of Quiet, the Extinction of Suffering.

Better to wander in the claustrophobic corridors of this Living, of this institution you know, O ward of an austere and clinging governess. Than exit its gates for that swallowing wide unnamed and uncharted, that preposterous landscape which your agoraphobe friend greeted too soon. --Nobody Gets Out Of This Dead ... Chapter 4
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain
“The nature of consciousness is to point beyond itself. It is a tending toward or pointing to... Since consciousness points beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

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"I find standing and posing for photos very awkward."---Nicole Kidman

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“When Van Gogh painted The Starry Night as a swirling mass of cosmic energy, he may have been painting what he saw with neurotic eyes, but he was also painting what he saw with transcendent eyes. The first gave his painting mere form, the second gave it formless, universal emotion that connects directly to the viewer.”
― Amit Goswami, Quantum Creativity: Waking Up to Our Creative Potential

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“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― Mary Oliver

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''Never think you're weak if you cry. Every tear is replaced with wisdom and strength.'' - Bryant McGill
“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
“Come out here where the roses have opened.
Let soul and world meet.

The sun has drawn a fine-tempered blade
of light. We may as well surrender."---Rumi

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