But to give up on his need for excess, for the immense thing, the thing that made him feel like a surfer in the snow, riding the crest of an avalanche's leading edge! To say good-bye to that need would also be to accept that he was, in the matter of desire, agreeing to be dead. And when the living agree with themselves to be dead, with dark fury begins. The dark fury of life, refusing to die before its allotted time.

The movies were infantilizing their audience, Solanka thought, or perhaps the easily infantilizable were drawn to movies of a certain simplified kind. Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anesthetized people and they went into the movies' simpler worlds to remember how to feel. As a result, in the minds of many adults, The experience on offer in the movie theaters now felt more real than what was available in the world outside.

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure—the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.

On your last day on Earth, the person you could have become will meet the person you became. 

 

 

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. 

 

...such people are themselves too dull to understand how far a noble nature, an honorable ancestry and a virtuous upbringing can fortify men against grief, and that although fate may defeat the efforts of virtue to avert misfortune, it cannot deprive us of the power to endure it with equanimity.

Plutarch on Cornelia, the mother of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus

If you're born to it, if you're like the salamander, it must be like heaven, as if heaven were on Earth. The hell must be that no one will leave you alone here in heaven. That people hunt you and people kill you and people just cannot be still in their own bodies and listen and watch and hear but must somehow escape the beat of their own hearts by ever being in motion, even when they come to rest.