“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting...By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”

-- Marilynne Robinson

('Housekeeping' 1980)

"The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. [We are] subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear, subject to the rule of what the Buddhists call 𝒹𝓊𝓀𝒽𝒶, the endless unsatisfied anguish of a being who passionately desires only illusory goods."

~ Iris Murdoch

('The Black Prince' 1973)

You reach a certain age…and you realize you’ve been well and truly conned.

Being born is the first con…and everything after is just one insult piled on top of another until you die.

"If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more successfully he can repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes... from painful truth."

~ Otto Rank
(‘Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit’ 1929)
(‘Truth and Reality’ 1929)

“Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause.”

~ Max Stirner
(‘The Ego and Its Own’ 1844)