Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.
...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.
Hey, do you want to end this right now?" Her eyes flared. "I wouldn't have asked you out if I'd wanted to end it. Sit back, eat and enjoy. Pretend I'm dead.
Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.
Hasn't there always been a moon?" "Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue...
Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.
That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.
We can talk about it, dream about it and dissect the fine print. In the end, only action satisfies our longing.
Our whole lives, it was like we were always trying so hard to be perfect - for our families and our friends, for each other - when the funny thing was, we didn't have to. In the end, we were better than that.
There are some who said I should have fought harder or longer than I did for my marriage, but in the end fighting for love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.
I've never believed in the end of times. We are mankind. Our footprints are on the moon. When the last trumpet sounds and the beast rises from the pit---we will kill it.
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
If people feel lost and alone and helpless and broken and hopeless today, what will it be like if the world really begins to come apart at the hinges?
A rock is harder than a feather, you can talk and jabber and make exceptions, but in the end, if you have to choose which one is gonna hit you on the head, you'll choose the feather every single time.
If economies collapse and lawlessness rules and resources are scarce, many people who claim with their mouths that they follow Jesus... will abandon him with their lives.
Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.
In my illustrious career as a university student, I turned in over 100 papers so that one day, in the end, I got 1 paper in return.
Some of us walk around with a necklace of hope, an armour of sanity, but at the end of the day, they always come off. We reveal our naked, vulnerable, real selves.
