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[escafilyugen]

To All Nihilists (including me)

It's simple. 

Life's usually irritating and tedious. There are so many people on this planet and so many individual factors affecting each other individual factor, that the probability of knowing what is actually going on is zilch. You're almost never going to get what you want. 

There is more than enough horrifying shit in the world for a perfectly happy person to be diagnosed with clinical depression, and suffer from it for a thousand years. 

In all of humanity, not more than a few people ever make any lasting impact (that isn't forgotten two generations hence). And those who do, their relevance and beliefs are often warped out of recognition, or misinterpreted. Every second idiot today claims to know what Marx and Freud said, not knowing that most of their theories have been disproved are no longer relevant in the 21st century. (I mean, their theories were flawed to begin with, but whatever). 

On a macroscopic scale, each and everyone of us is so hilariously insignificant, we can't even comprehend it.Life has no great meaning. 

Life exists because it can. Life just wants to be, but it doesn't want to be much. 

You're as significant as a dirty little patch of moss that has taken hold in a corner you haven't cleaned in years. 

All of this is absolutely and undeniably true.

But that doesn't mean life isn't worth it. Or that it's shit. Or that death is the only release.

Extremely irregular events aside, you're the only one who can affect your life decisions. You decide, for the most part, how you're going to live.

Life doesn't have any meaning if you don't want it to. And it has all the meaning you want, if you want it to.

The only thing any of us can do is get through one day after another, doing what we think is best.

The fact that life is generally shit doesn't make a difference if you don't let it. (again, there are certain exceptions where you have absolutely no control, but this is a point besides that).

You're the only one who can make your life worth something. No one else is going to spend their life fixing yours.

What makes a difference at the end of the day, is what you choose to focus on. How you choose to take everything life throws at you, and weather on anyway. Because honestly, what else can you do? What else can any of us do?

It’s been a while since I posted my own writing, but still~

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The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.

Haldane

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Of course, you never really forget anyone, but you certainly release them. You stop allowing their history to have any meaning for you today. You let them change their haircut, let them move, let them fall in love again. And when you see this person you have let go, you realize that there is no reason to be sad. The person you knew exists somewhere, but you are separated by too much time to reach them again.

Chelsea Fagan, Read on The Artidote

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That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick

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On the flipside of everything we think we absolutely understand lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

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Newspapers are all the same. They never tell you what you really want to know.

Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

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Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I'm speaking from experience, Somebody once said if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained.

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I think I was a quite grown up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.

Arundhati Roy

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I hope I never get tired of the night sky, of thunderstorms, of watching cream make galaxies in my coffee. This world is ugly. I hope I never grow to be someone who can no longer see the small beautiful things.

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And kid, you’ve got to love yourself. You’ve got to wake up at four in the morning, brew black coffee, and stare at the birds drowning in the darkness of the dawn. You’ve got to sit next to the man at the train station who’s reading your favorite book and start a conversation. You’ve got to come home after a bad day and burn your skin from a shower. Then you’ve got to wash all your sheets until they smell of lemon detergent you bought for four dollars at the local grocery store. You’ve got to stop taking everything so goddam personally. You are not the moon kissing the black sky. You’ve got to compliment someones crooked brows at an art fair and tell them that their eyes remind you of green swimming pools in mid July. You’ve got to stop letting yourself get upset about things that won’t matter in two years. Sleep in on Saturday mornings and wake yourself up early on Sunday. You’ve got to stop worrying about what you’re going to tell her when she finds out. You’ve got to stop over thinking why he stopped caring about you over six months ago. You’ve got to stop asking everyone for their opinions. Fuck it. Love yourself, kiddo. You’ve got to love yourself.

Unknown, Read on The Artidote

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I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

Haruki Murakami (via quotemadness)

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I’ve always said you make a choice in this world. You can see the world as being tragic, or you can see it as being funny. Some things just flat-out aren’t funny, of course. But with very few exceptions, you can usually find the humor in life and in people. I guess if you want to see the world as being sad, terrible, unfair, boo-hoo boo-hoo, that’s fine. But man, what kind of life is that?

Marco, Megamorphs #2: In the Time of Dinosaurs, pg. 114 (by K.A. Applegate)

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It is strange how alone you are at times of great personal crisis. Strange is too convenient a term, and too euphemistic. The hard and cold fact of the matter is that nearly everyone who knows you draws back from you as if you bore some terrible contagion. At least, that’s how it seems to you.

Tennessee Williams, from “Memoirs,” (via planetahmane)

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I need you to listen to me when I say things because sometimes it’s hard for me to say things.

Rachel Wolchin 

But you don’t listen

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Finding a Box of Family Letters

The dead say little in their letters

they haven't said before. We find no secrets, and yet how different every sentence sounds heard across the years.

My father breaks my heart simply by being so young and handsome. He's half my age, with jet-black hair. Look at him in his navy uniform grinning beside his dive-bomber. Come back, Dad! I want to shout. He says he misses all of us (though I haven't yet been born).

He writes from places I never knew he saw, and everyone he mentions now is dead. There is a large, long photograph curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago. My parents sit uncomfortably among tables of dark-suited strangers. The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

I wonder what song the band was playing, just out of frame, as the photographer arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot? Get out there on the floor and dance! You don't have forever.

What does it cost to send a postcard to the underworld? I'll buy a penny stamp from World War II and mail it downtown at the old post office just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

Surely the ghost of some postal worker still makes his nightly rounds, his routine too tedious for him to notice when it ended. He works so slowly he moves back in time carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.

It's silly to get sentimental. The dead have moved on. So should we. But isn't it equally simple-minded to miss the special expertise of the departed in clarifying our long-term plans?

They never let us forget that the line between them and us is only temporary. Get out there and dance! the letters shout adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home! And soon we will be. See you there. -Dana Gioia

#poetry

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It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason.

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I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.

Gilda Radner (via planetahmane)