"Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?"
Wendell Berry

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you."
from Life of Pi by Yann Martel

"the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
from Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
Jonathan Safran Foer

"Bliss Flight", from my sketchbook, 9/13/09

" The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."
J. D. Salinger

"...the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."
from Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
from Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

"War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure."
Adrienne Rich

"Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others."
Martin Luther King Jr.

"Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection."
from White Noise by Don DeLillo

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
Chuck Palahniuk

"The more you know the less you feel.'
from the song 'City of Blinding Lights' by U2

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi

"Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity."
from Language, Counter Memory, Practice by Michel Foucault

"I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream."
Vincent Van Gogh

"And what have I invested in interpreting disfocus for chaos? This threat: the only lesson is to wait. I crouch in the smoggy terminus. The streets lose edges, the rims of thought flake. What have I set myself to fix in this dirty notebook that is not mine? Does the revelation that, though it cannot be done with words, it might be accomplished in some lingual gap, give me the right, in injury, walking with a woman and her dog in pain? Rather the long doubts: that this labor tears up the mind's moorings; that, though life may be important in the scheme, awareness is an imperfect tool with which to face it. To reflect is to fight away the sheets of silver, the carbonated distractions, the feeling that, somehow, a thumb is pressed on the right eye. This exhaustion melts what binds, releases what flows."
from Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

"Stay?" Loufer's voice neared that other, upsetting tone. "Well, actually, I've thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with- I got a theory now- freedom. You know, here- " ahead, something moved- "you're free. No laws to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become- " they neared another half-lit lamp; what moved became smoke, lobling from a window sill set with glass teeth like an extinguished jack-o-lantern- "exactly who you are." And Tak was visible again. "If you're ready for that, this is where it's at."
from Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

"The progressive world is necessarily divided into two classes - those who take the best of what there is and enjoy it - and those who wish for something better and try to create it. Without these two classes the world would be badly off. They are the very conditions of progress, both the one and the other. Were none who were discontented with what the have, the world would never reach anything better." from the essay 'Cassandra' by Florence Nightingale