August 2025
    M T W T F S S
     123
    45678910
    11121314151617
    18192021222324
    25262728293031

    I’m reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck right now and I wanted to share a passage that struck me, as many have so far.

    “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I just choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that out death brings no pleasure to our world.”

    I, like everyone, think about my own death and mortality. And I think often about how I interact with the world, my good and my evils. I think recognizing that some vices or negative things that belong to me may be my short cuts in an attempt to be loved, and that I may be able to find holy or good replacements for things on my way to my own death. And I will live my life In a way that, upon my inevitable death, I can be cherished as good.

    Edit: Thank you everyone who’s shared, I have about 12,000 new books to read. Never a bad problem!

    by thetravelingsong

    32 Comments

    1. theylivewesleep42 on

      I don’t remember the exact line so I’m paraphrasing, but I read Metropolis by Thea Van Harbou when I was younger, and she says ‘The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.’ That to me was profound when I read it.

    2. “You can’t live in a world with such strong likes and dislikes.” Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. He is such and incredible writer.

      This is only the one I could think of, or the first one that popped into my head. That whole book is such a delight to read. I also re-read The Poetics of Space and that had some very sweet monologues as well. “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

    3. alpha_rat_fight_ on

      From “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury: “Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.”

      The quote isn’t about literal sadness though, at least not the kind you’d immediately think about or associate with depression. He was talking about the kind of sad that adults get when they see something happen with undertones that a kid might miss. Like the knowledge that this will be the last time they see a best friend, or the knowledge that things will change after losing a job. He was actually talking about young people who lose their sense of childlike innocence faster, or sometimes never had it.

      At the time that I read it I just felt seen. Now, I look at it as a reminder that childlike wonder is something you have to choose to preserve, because at some point there will always be a tragedy that shatters it. So it’s on you to either keep it broken or patch it up best you can.

    4. pineapplesf on

      With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

    5. bottle-of-smoke on

      “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

    6. “What right thing ends with more dead than less?”

      *The Heroes* by Joe Abercrombie.

    7. AfflictedCabbage on

      “ ‘And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived. “ ‘In the end, I must proclaim that no good can be achieved of false means. For the substance of our existence is not in the achievement, but in the method…’ ”

      -Brandon Sanderson (The Way of Kings)

    8. “Man overboard! But the ship does not stop . . . It sails on. The man sinks and reappears, flings up his arms and shouts, but no one hears. The ship, heeling in the wind, is intent upon its business, and passengers and crew have lost sight of him, a pin-point in the immensity of the sea. . . . He is adrift in the monstrous waters with only their turbulence beneath him, hideously enclosed by wave-crests shredded by the wind, smothered as they break over his head, tumbled from one to another, rising and sinking into unfathomable darkness where he seems to become a part of the abyss, his mouth filled with bitter resentment at this treacherous ocean that is so resolved to destroy him, this monster toying with his death. To him the sea has become the embodiment of hatred. . . . He calls to anyone or anything – he calls and calls but there is no reply, nothing on the face of the waters, nothing in the heavens. He calls to the sea and spray, but they are deaf; he calls to the winds, but they are answerable only to infinity. Around him dusk and solitude, the heedless tumult of wild waters; within him terror and exhaustion; below him the dissent into nothingness. No foothold. He pictures his body adrift in that limitless dark. The chill numbs him. His hands open and close, clutching at nothing. Wind and tumult and useless stars. What can he do? Despair ends in resignation, exhaustion chooses death, and so at length he gives up the struggle and his body sinks forever.”

      Victor Hugo ~ Les Miserables

    9. BadBrohmance on

      “People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.”

      Cormac McCarthy, *The Road*

    10. “Yukio was beset by a mysterious feeling. The lighting hadn’t gotten brighter: yet everything now looked fresh to his eyes. His despair at life had metamorphosed into hope. His outlook had changed unrecognisably.

      The world hasn’t changed, I have”

      Before the Coffee gets Cold: Tales from the café – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

      This was one of those quotes I read at the exact right time in my life to reflect how I was feeling.

    11. This passage from Slaughterhouse-5 by Vonnegut really resonated with me when I was going through a difficult time in my life:

      “All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
      When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”

    12. “Fill your bowl to the brim

      and it will spill.

      Keep sharpening your knife

      and it will blunt.

      Chase after money and security

      and your heart will never unclench.

      Care about people’s approval

      and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back.

      The only path to serenity.”

      Lao Tzu (Tao te ching)

    13. doomblackdeath on

      From *Crime and Punishment* by Dostoevsky:

      “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

    14. ClarkeBrower on

      Don’t forget this gem from East Of Eden .. ‘Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.’

    15. CCHTweaked on

      “Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.”

      -Jim Butcher

      ​

      Edit – Formatting

    16. gagagamgee on

      I was watching the livestream of Rocketlab’s There And Back Again mission recently and was reminded of the beautiful passage that Carl Sagan wrote of the cosmos. It’s a brilliant summation of man’s place in the universe. It humbles me. It reminds me not to take things too seriously. I read this every now and then and feel an overwhelming love for the planet, my fellow humans, and yes, even my horrible neighbour, Greg.

      “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

      The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

      Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

      The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

      It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

    17. CCHTweaked on

      “We still hadn’t learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you’re just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

      Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point, you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There’s the little empty pain of leaving something behind – graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There’s the big, whirling pain of life upending all your plans and expectations. There are the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn’t give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life they grow and learn. There’s the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

      And if you’re very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last – and yet will remain with you for life.

      Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don’t feel it.

      Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it’s a big part, and sometimes it isn’t, but either way, it’s a part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you’re alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it to one degree or another.” ― Jim Butcher

    18. jibabadebadido on

      “For there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” -Herman Melville

    19. stronkbelwas on

      From “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas “Until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words,—’Wait and hope. ‘”

    20. “It is possible to live well even in a Palace” – Marcus Aurelius. Antoninus, Emperor of Rome

      What he meant was, that though you had to live in a Palace, you could still camp out and eat simple food.

    21. “To love someone is like moving into a house,” Sonja used to say. “At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one’s own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That’s it, all the little secrets that make it your home.”

    22. douchebag_karren on

      “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
      ― Anais Nin

    23. Towards the end of The Left Hand of Darkness, Ai remarks of the people in the town who fed and housed them when they came out of the ice: “They gave with both hands.”

      Such a short, poetic line. I try to give with both hands, I try to live that. It’s made my life beautiful.

    24. “All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

      REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

      “Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

      YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

      “So we can believe the big ones?”

      YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

      “They’re not the same at all!”

      YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

      “Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

      MY POINT EXACTLY.

    25. “Madness is something rare in individuals- but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” -Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil

    26. theexpanse95 on

      I could say with full on confidence that the entirety of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius changed the way I view life but this is one of my favorite quotes of his.

      “People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.”

    27. “…research tells us that we judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived shaming deficiency.”

      ― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

    28. stumbling_coherently on

      It’s commonly attributed to Aristotle and Nicomachean Ethics but that’s apparently a misinterpretation. It’s not really important where or who it’s attributed to but it’s very simple and has informed alot of how I approach, life and work.

      “The Mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it”

    29. TuorAtVinyamar on

      “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” – Mark Twain

    30. The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear out of the Dune trilogy by Frank Herbert has actually, in real life and in a very real way, helped me many times:

      “I must not fear.
      Fear is the mind-killer.
      Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
      I will face my fear.
      I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
      And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
      Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

    31. This one from Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless is always in my mind in everything I do – especially coding at work but applies to almost anything: “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

    32. I recently reread Ursula Le Guin’s “The Lathe of Heaven” and came across this.

      “They washed up the dishes and went to bed. In bed, they made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.”

    Leave A Reply