"It begins when the object of your affection bestows upon you a heady hallucinogenic dose of something you've never even dared to admit you wanted; an emotional speedball of thunderous love and excitement. Soon you start craving that attention with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When it's withheld you turn sick, crazy, not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff. Goddamn him and he used to give it to you for free. Next stage finds you skinny, shaking in a corner, certain only that you'd sell your soul just to have that one thing one more time. Meanwhile the object of your adoration is now repulsed by you. He looks at you like someone he's never met before. The irony is you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. You have now reached infatuations final destination, the complete and merciless devaluation of self.”
"My whole life fits in a 12-foots-square box. Wow.
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You know how many times I hear that in a day? Most of them never come back for their whole life."
"There is a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging:"Dear saint, please, please, please... let me win the lottery." Finally, the exasperated statue comes to life and looks down at the begging man and says:"My son, please, please, please buy a ticket.""
"Everything falls apart, my dear. The only thing permanent in life is family."
"Americans know entertainment, but don't know pleasure."
""dolce far niente". It means the sweetness of doing nothing. We are masters of it."
"What if we just acknowledge that we have a screwed-up relationship and we stick it out anyway? We accept that we fight a lot..and we hardly have sex anymore but that we don't wanna live without each other. And that way we can spend our lives together, miserable... but happy not to be apart.
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Dear David, we haven't had any communication in a while and it's given me time I needed to think. Remember when you said we should live with each other and be unhappy so we could be happy? Consider it a testimony to how much I love you that I spent so long pouring myself into that offer, trying to make it work.
But a friend took me to the most amazing place the other day, it's called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to house his remains. When the barbarians came, they trashed it along with everything else. The great Augustus, Rome's first true great Emperor , how could he have imagined that Rome, the whole world as far as he was concerned, would one day be in ruins?
It's one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome. The city has grown up, around it over centuries, feels like a precious womb, like a heartache you won't let go of…as it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same, David. Settle for living in misery because we're afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins .
Then I looked around this place, at the chaos it's endured, the way it's been adapted, burnt, pillaged then found a way to build itself back up again and I was reassured. Maybe my life hasn't been so chaotic, it's just the world that is and the only real trap is getting attached to any of it.
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
Even in this eternal city, the Augusteum showed me that we must always be prepared for endless waves of transformation.
Both of us deserve better than staying together because we're afraid we'll be destroyed if we don't”
"You have to learn to select your thoughts the same way you select your cloth every day. That's a power you can cultivate. You wanna come here and you wanna control your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control. Cuz if you can't master your thoughts, you're in trouble forever."
"Sometimes to lose balance for love is part of living a balanced life."
"In the end, I've come to believe in something I call "The Physics of the Quest." A force in nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity. The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this: If you 're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.”
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