Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer
Source: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 17 (p. 406)
Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer
Source: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Teresa Medeiros (1962) American writer
Source: Charming the Prince
Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam
https://hawzah.net/fa/Magazine/View/2689/3869/29058
Sunni Hadith
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)
Der Beruf folgt so wenig aus der Wissenschaft, dass sie ihn sogar ausschließen kann. Denn die Wissenschaft duldet ihrem Wesen nach keine Lösung von sich.
The Life of Students (1915)
Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) Monk and archbishop
Source: The Parables of Jesus: Sermons by Saint Gregory Palamas
“One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.”
William Styron book Darkness Visible
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), VI
Context: There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain’s demands — o accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to that alleviation, whether it be through sleep or Tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body’s capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
“Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”
James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician
Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) p. 1207.
Criticism
“We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.”
Alice Hoffman book The Dovekeepers
Source: The Dovekeepers