“I never can understand how anyone can not smoke — it deprives a man of the best part of life … with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him — literally.”

Source: White Oleander

Sober, written by Pink, Nate Hills, Kara DioGuardi, and Marcella Araica
Song lyrics, Funhouse (2008)

Source: Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

Source: The Other Boleyn Girl

Source: Bruiser

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXIV: On Virtue as a Refuge From Worldly Distractions

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

The transference-object is then a natural fetishization for man’s highest yearnings and strivings. Again we see what a marvelous “talent” transference is. It is a form of creative fetishism, the establishment of a locus from which our lives can draw the powers they need and want. What is more wanted than immortality-power? How wonderful and how facile to be able to take our whole immortality-striving and make it part of a dialogue with a single human being. We don’t know, on this planet, what the universe wants from us or is prepared to give us. We don’t have an answer to the question that troubled Kant of what our duty is, what we should be doing on earth. We live in utter darkness about who we are and why we are here, yet we know it must have some meaning. What is more natural, then, than to take this unspeakable mystery and dispel it straightaway by addressing our performance of heroics to another human being, knowing thus daily whether this performance is good enough to earn us eternity. If it is bad, we know that it is bad by his reactions and so are able instantly to change it.
Source: The Denial of Death (1973), The Spell Cast by Persons—The Nexus of Unfreedom

Source: Odd Thomas