For sometimes you can’t help but crave some ruin in what you love.
. . .
We have to remind ourselves that it's perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one's mark on it.
. . .
Too intense a longing, everyone knows, can lead to poor decisions, rash actions, hopes that become outsized and in turn deform reality.
. . .
For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it's when we're closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we'll tread through any flame.
. . .
What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted, and then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit. But that you still come back for more.
. . .
He should have had more faith in himself rather than give in to his weaker qualities, in particular his overeagerness to please and aversion to conflict and a lifelong infatuation with hope, which had him dreaming more than doing.
. . .
For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges mutating over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic.
