Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it's not death we're afraid of but too much life.
Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of "you can't."
There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone. The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
3mo ago
We shall make mistakes; and I venture to affirm that it is better to make every possible mistake, and to correct them all, than to be paralyzed by the fear of making any.
4mo ago
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so. It is an easy task, because people who are intellectually lazy are convinced that this miserable terror is "the truth", that this terror is knowledge of the "extra-mental" world. This is an easy way out, resulting in a banal explanation of the world as terrifying.
Kids who'd seen it—or, even better, whose older siblings had—spoke in whispers about its contents, less because they were afraid of being overheard by an adult than because it felt as if even putting its terrible images into words might open the door to some unimaginable evil.
What if ICE was lurking at the parking lot or in the lobby? If he got deported, what would the family do? For two days, he didn't go to work. He lay in bed, hoping it would heal.
7mo ago
The terror of the unfamiliar is the root of all superstition; yet the familiar itself is but the accumulated strangeness of yesterday.
8mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
