Is a heartache real if no one will listen?

Sometimes when the pain is so bad words just do not adequately comfort.

So simply feeling the hurt is about all that I can endure at any given time. At least I know that I'm alive.

Sometimes we suffer desperately, would do anything, try anything, but are lost, see no way. We cast about, distract ourselves, search, but find no connection between the misery we feel and the way we live. The pain comes from nowhere, gives no clue. We are bored, nothing has meaning; we become depressed. What to do? How to live? Something is wrong but we cannot imagine another way of living which would free us.

Yet there must be a way, for no sustained feeling can exist as a thing in itself, independent of what we do. If the suffering is serious and intractable it must be intimately and extensively connected, in ways we do not perceive, with the way we live. We have to look for such connections. Sometimes there is nothing to be done until they are found.

~~~Allen Wheelis~~~

I don't ask much from my fellow man except a little respect.

And you can damn well believe that I'll show them their due respect but I better get it back in return.

Is that the proper way to be?

Probably not but at least everyone knows where I stand on the issue.

"By nature, we do not perceive ourselves or others accurately. We magnify the importance of ourselves and diminish that of others. In the beauty of a clear night, however, we look at the stars and feel ourselves small, unimportant, and at peace. On an objective scale, we sense our insignificance. Somehow the realization comforts us. The return of the illusion hurts us, takes our peace away, allows us to magnify slights, rejections, and humiliations as others challenge the illusion of our self-importance with theirs. It is in our human nature that this be so; it is our task to transcend it."
- Barry Grosskopf
Hidden in Plain Sight

"The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from - my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back."
- C.S. Lewis

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

"The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night."

~~~Friedrich Nietzsche~~~

When life has meaning, desire is held to its proper place ... "proper" being the shape and scope and authority allowed to it by the interlocking structure of values that constitutes the meaning of life. When life is without meaning, desire is a wildfire out of control.

~~~Allen Wheelis~~~

"Now you just remember this ... heaven is as blissful and lovely as it can be; but it's just the busiest place you ever heard of. There ain't any idle people here ... after the first day. Singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity is mighty pretty when you hear about it in the pulpit, but it's as poor a way to put in valuable time as a body could contrive. It would just make a heaven of warbling ignoramuses, don't you see? Eternal Rest sounds mighty comforting in the pulpit too. Well, you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands. Why Stormfield, a man like you, that had been active and stirring all his life, would go mad in six months in a heaven where he hadn't anything to do. Heaven is the very last place to come to rest in! ... and don't you be afraid to bet on that!"

~Mark Twain, Stormfield's Visit To Heaven~

If we believe that all people are equally good, then we also have to believe that all people are equally bad.

And if we believe ... as I do ... that black people are equal to white people, then we have to believe that, if and when they gain the power and the might, black people will behave precisely the way white people behave.

And so, I said, if I live to be eighty, I expect to see white children marched into the gas chamber at the hands of a black Eichmann.

~~~Will Campbell~~~