“[…] maybe there are no easy paths. Maybe there are just paths. […] we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad. Midnight Library

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes , which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble as it pleases. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and even if we dream, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two. Oliver Twist

In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

To tell my story I have to start far in the past. If I could, I’d have to go back much farther yet, to the very earliest years of my childhood and even beyond them to my distant origins. Demian