
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
Source: The Year of Magical Thinking
"L'Isolement", Méditations Poétiques (1820)
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
Source: The Year of Magical Thinking
Franny and Zooey (1961), Zooey (1957)
Context: I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that — and you do — and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.
“Sometimes it seems safer to hold it all in, where the only person who can judge is yourself.”
Variant: It seemed safer to hold it in, where the only one who could judge was me.
Source: Just Listen
Quand il étoit en colère, un de ses yeux devenoit si terrible qu'on n'en pouvoit pas soutenir les regards: le malheureux sur lequel il le fixoit tomboit à la renverse, & quelquefois même expiroit à l'instant. Aussi, dans la crainte de dépeupler ses états, & de faire un désert de son palais, ce prince ne se mettoit en colère que très-rarement.
Source: Vathek, P. 3; translation p. 1.
“I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world.”
“My point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.”
Source: Kafka on the Shore
Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 312