I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, ‘The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.’ Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.
Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
The whole reason I’m having us talk about my record and what I get afraid might happen is that I don’t want it to happen, see? […]I don’t want to get all testy or hypercritical or pull away and not be around for days at a time… Does this make any sense? Can you believe that I’m honestly trying to respect you by warning you about me, in a way? That I’m trying to by honest instead of dishonest? That I’ve decided that the best way to head off this pattern where you get hurt and fell abandoned and I fell like sh!! Is to try to be honest for once. Even if I should have done it sooner?[…]Do you understand that I’m trying as hard as I can to love you? That I’m terrified that I can’t love?
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think…The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.
David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories
I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, ‘The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.’ Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.
Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
Knowing there is a light at the end of the tunnel keeps us going through it, but understanding the darkness in the tunnel helps us negotiate it. The full truth is that power comes with pain. Hardship is the neglected and misunderstood second half of the truth, and it completes the view. True spirituality is not about making you feel good. It is about making you feel real.
Andrew Holecek, The Power and the Pain (via walkwhilereading)

(via walkwhilereading-deactivated201)

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes…
Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?”