Most people these days don’t seem to respond to gentle prodding. Our problems stem from too much coddling and our delusional sense of entitlement. You have to earn respect, success, and health - and that comes from hard work, thinking outside of the box and finding mentors you trust who will push you outside of your comfort zone.
Tony Horton

Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.
Albert Camus. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.

She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad.
Albert Camus, The Stranger

To just go into another room and make pictures. It’s magic time. Where all your weaknesses of character and all blemishes of personality and whatever else torments you fades away.
Maurice Sendak

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Why did he write to her,
“I can’t live without you”?
And why did she write to him,
“I can’t live without you”?
For he went west, she went east
And they both lived.
Carl Sandburg. One Parting.

there is thinking about you.
then, there is touching myself
while i imagine that you
hold my eyes shut and slap me
until i see the aurora borealis bloom inside my head.
i will try very hard to hold this image steady in my mind
as i tongue the point of a turnip.
i want you to touch me there, there, there, there and there.
i want you to read this and imagine where “there” is.
there is thinking about you,
and then there is choking myself with turnips
partially naked as i gaze into your status update.
i want you to hear “partially”
and imagine a necktie and a rose petal
doing their best to cover us.
i want you to touch me there, there, there, there and there.
i want you to say, “there, there,”
as you snatch my turnips away from me
and brush my lips with the cherry
of a cigarette.
yes, i went there.
yes, this is that there.
there is what happens to me
when you leave the room for five minutes.
there is a hunger like a trench in the belly of the sun.
then there is me wanting the day off
and a teddy bear with your smell clinging to its fur.
David Perez, I Want You To Touch Me There, There, There, There and There